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Learn about the age of Newton, Descartes, Pascal, Locke, Rousseau, and more from one of world’s leading intellectual historians.
The Birth of the Modern Mind: The Intellectual History of the 17th and 18th Centuries
Overview
Syllabus
- 01: Introduction—Intellectual History and Conceptual Change
- 02: The Dawn of the 17th Century—Aristotelian Scholasticism
- 03: The New Vision of Francis Bacon
- 04: The New Astronomy and Cosmology
- 05: Descartes's Dream of Perfect Knowledge
- 06: The Specter of Thomas Hobbes
- 07: Skepticism and Jansenism—Blaise Pascal
- 08: Newton's Discovery
- 09: The Newtonian Revolution
- 10: John Locke—The Revolution in Knowledge
- 11: The Lockean Moment
- 12: Skepticism and Calvinism—Pierre Bayle
- 13: The Moderns—The Generation of 1680-1715
- 14: Introduction to Deism
- 15: The Conflict Between Deism and Christianity
- 16: Montesquieu and the Problem of Relativism
- 17: Voltaire—Bringing England To France
- 18: Bishop Joseph Butler and God's Providence
- 19: The Skeptical Challenge to Optimism—David Hume
- 20: The Assault upon Philosophical Optimism—Voltaire
- 21: The Philosophes—The Triumph of the French Enlightenment
- 22: Beccaria and Enlightened Reform
- 23: Rousseau's Dissent
- 24: Materialism & Naturalism—The Boundaries of the Enlightenment
- By This Professor
Taught by
Alan Charles Kors
