The age of reason - 17th century philosophers pdf

New American Library | 1956 | Pdf | Eng | 186 pag | 21 MB

By Stuart Hampshire

THE Age of Reason, edited by the outstanding teacher and author, Stuart Hampshire, presents selections from the basic writings of such great 17th century philosophers as Bacon, Pascal, Hobbes, Galileo, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, with a penetrating introduction and interpretive commentary illuminating their works.

The 17th century was the great formative era of modern philosophy, marked by the decline of medieval conceptions of knowledge, by the rise of the physical sciences and by the gradual transition from Latin to French and English as instruments of philosophical thought. In this age of reason, philosophers began to explain natural processes in mathematical terms. They also developed vital concepts of knowledge and certainty, appearance and reality, freedom and necessity, mind and matter, deduction and experiment