To a large extent, modern philosophy begins with a rejection of tradition.
Whereas medieval philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas had taken great pains to
incorporate and reconcile ancient writings, early modern philosophers such as
René Descartes encouraged their readers to make a clean sweep of the past.
Previous thinkers had been deluded by errors in thinking or had relied too heavily
on authority. In the modern age, the wisdom of the past was to be discarded as
error-prone. As Descartes observed in his Meditations,

Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted

as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that

I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the

course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the

foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable

and likely to last.

This quest to establish a stable intellectual foundation on which to build some-
thing “likely to last” characterized seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European
philosophy. “British Empiricists,” such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and
David Hume found such a foundation in sensory experience and developed their
thought on that basis. On the other hand, the “Continent Rationalists,” philoso-
phers such as Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz, thought the
senses inadequate for such a task. They considered reason superior to experience
and sought to establish their philosophies on the basis of more certain principles.
The greatest of the modern philosophers, Immanuel Kant, sought to combine

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PHILOSOPHY



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