Seven thinkers and how they grew: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz; Locke, Berkeley, Hume; Kant

Abstract

Literary, philosophical, and historical studies often rely on a notion of what is canonical . In American philosophy scholars go from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey; in American literature from James Fenimore Cooper to F. Scott Fitzgerald; in political theory from Plato to Hobbes and Locke; in literary criticism from Aristotle to T. S. Eliot (or perhaps Harold Bloom); in economic thought from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes. The texts or authors who fill in the blanks from A to Z in these, and other intellectual traditions, constitute the canon, and there is an accompanying narrative that links text to text or author to author, a ‘history of’ American literature, economic thought, and so on. The most conventional of such histories are embodied in university courses and the textbooks that accompany them. This essay examines one such course, the History of Modern Philosophy, and the texts that helped to create it. If a philosopher in the United States were asked why the seven people in my title comprise Modern Philosophy, the initial response would be: they were the best, and there are historical and philosophical connections among them. This is a quick answer because reflection usually makes the philosopher slightly uncomfortable. In England Modern Philosophy is: Descartes; Locke, Berkeley, Hume; and only recently Kant. In France it is heavily weighted the other way – toward Cartesian rationalism: Descartes, Geulincz, Malebranche – and then a quick trip through the eighteenth century to Kant.

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