Early Modern European Philosophy

(4 Credits)

This course is a survey of European philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one of the most important and exciting times in the history of philosophy. We will be focusing on six philosophers who lived and worked in this period: René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. Through their writings, we will trace and study philosophical arguments and debates concerning the possibility and extent of our knowledge of the external world, the nature of the self, the nature of substance and causation, the existence of God, and the relation between our minds and our bodies.