Modern philosophy : the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries / Richard Francks.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Francks, Richard.

Series:

Fundamentals of philosophy.

Fundamentals of philosophy

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Philosophy, Modern--17th century.

Philosophy, Modern.

Philosophy, Modern--18th century.

Physical Description:

xvii, 297 p. : ill.

Place of Publication:

Montreal ; Ithaca : McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Through vivid and witty prose Richard Francks presents the ideas that have informed the development of philosophy as we know it. Our current approaches to central philosophical problems - the existence of God, the mind/body problem, the idea of the self, and the existence of the world - originated in the texts of these six thinkers, as did broader questions about political and social philosophy. This book is ideal for anyone encountering the ideas of these thinkers for the first time.

Contents:

Front Matter

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

René Descartes

Material Monism or the Great Soup of Being

The Possibility of Atheism

The Limits of Mechanism

Selling the Picture

Baruch Spinoza

God, or Nature?

The attribute of thought

Spinoza’s Ethics

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

The Principle of Sufficient Reason

The Best of all Possible Worlds

The World as Explicable

Matter, Mind and Human Life

John Locke

On Living in the World

Locke on Nature (and Our Knowledge of it)

The Life of Man

George Berkeley

Denying the Obvious

Berkeley’s Disproof of the Existence of Matter

On What There Is

David Hume

Hume’s Project for a New Science

The Failure of the Project

The Lessons of Hume

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includesindex.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 289-291) and index.

ISBN:

0-7735-7176-0