here are some of the most significant figures of the early modern philosophers

Desiderius Erasmus, (1466–1536)

He was an Humanist philosopher , a philosophy that Humans have more importance rather than divine or supernatural matters. His most famous book is the “In praise of Folly”, which is a satirical attack on superstitions, various religious prejudice and traditions of European society, and on the Latin Church. This work had an important role in the beginnings of the Protestant reformation.

Niccolo Machiavelli,(1469 – 1527)

Niccolò Machiavelli was an Italian philosopher, public official, and he is especially known for his book “The Prince”.
Machiavelli believed that public and private morality should be understood as two separate things in order to rule well.
He says that a ruler should give priority to what is good for the government instead of focusing on moral and immoral actions. For Machiavelli, morality is simply enlightened self-interest. he argues that, Rulers should violate the laws of faith, humanity and religion if necessary to maintain or expand their position.
Machiavelli admonished that leaders should always conceal their true intentions, avoid inconsistency, and “do the utmost to preserve the state.” Many people criticize his philosophy as Machiavelli, extremely selfish, unjust, bad and therefore immoral.
Others say that there is no evidence that Machiavelli was anything like the kind of figure he argues for. Although this focus on reality-based politics has drawn criticism, he is regarded as the father of modern political philosophy.
“the end justifies the means” meaning like
the end is important enough to cancel any legal or moral limits on the methods used.

Some of his famous quotes are;


“It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot have both”

“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.”

“The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.”

“Never was anything great achieved without danger.”

“Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception.”

It is better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both.

Politics have no relation to morals

He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command.

The first method for estimating the intelligence of the ruler is look at the men he has around him.

If need be, be cruel, stingy, cunning, and forceful.
Be as cunning as a fox and forceful and bold like a lion.

Francis Bacon, (1561-1626)

Francis Bacon an English philosopher and statesman. he is Known as the father of empiricism. empiricism is the idea that all learning comes from only experience and careful observation. He was a fan of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle but also rejected much of Aristotle’s philosophy. He was the first philosopher to use a post-Aristotelian method for empirical research. In his book “Novum Organum” latin meaning ‘New Methode’ or “new tool” . he proposes a new scientific approach consisted of three main steps:
1, a description of facts;
2, a tabulation, or classification, of those facts into three categories—
a)instances of the presence of the characteristic under investigation,
b)instances of its absence, and
c)instances of its presence in varying degrees;
3, the rejection of whatever appears, in the light of these tables, not to be connected with the phenomenon under investigation and the determination of what is connected with it.

some Bacon qouates

knowledge, is power.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study.

Hugo Grotius ( 1583 — 1645)

Hugo Grotius Netherlands( 1583 — 1645, Rostock, Mecklenburg-Schwerin) was a Dutch jurist and scholar whose masterpiece De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625; On the Law of War and Peace) is considered one of the greatest contributions to the development of international law.

Thomas Hobbes, (1588–1679)

Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher, scientist, and historian. He was famous for his political philosophy ‘social contract theory‘ , the agreement between members of the society to overcome to a collective understanding. in his book “Leviathan” (The word comes from Hebrew livyathan which means a great sea monster) , Hobbes argues that human beings are not naturally social or political, that the state of nature (i.e. the natural state of human) is a state of war , therefor governmental authority rule is needed to create an agreement between members of the society based on mutual consent.

some Quotes from Hobbes

“Life is nasty, brutish, and short”

“He that is to govern a whole Nation, must read in himselfe, not this, or that particular man; but Man-kind;”

“It’s not the pace of life I mind. It’s the sudden stop at the end.”
“For it can never be that war shall preserve life, and peace destroy it.”

“The source of every crime, is some defect of the understanding; or some error in reasoning; or some sudden force of the passions. Defect in the understanding is ignorance; in reasoning, erroneous opinion.”

“The condition of man . . . is a condition of war of everyone against everyone”

“Words are the counters of wise men, and the money of fools. ”

Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.

Pierre Gassendi ( 1592 – 1655)

Pierre Gassendi ( 1592 – 1655) was a French philosopher, scientific chronicler, observer, and experimentalist, scholar of ancient texts and debates, and active participant in contemporary deliberations of the first half of the seventeenth century. His significance in early modern thought has in recent years been rediscovered and explored, towards a better understanding of the dawn of modern empiricism, the mechanical philosophy, and relations of modern philosophy to ancient and medieval discussions. While Gassendi is perhaps best known in history of philosophy for his disputes with Descartes, his relations with other major figures, including Kepler, Galileo, Mersenne, Beeckman, and Hobbes, represented even more important transactions of ideas. And while Gassendi also sought to communicate anew the ideas of Epicurus, the Stoics, and other earlier thinkers, his resulting amalgam of perspectives provides a modern view of his own making, one of the touchstones of philosophy and science in his times: our access to knowledge of the natural world is dependent on the constraints and

René Descartes, (1596 – 1650 )

Rene Decartes was a French philosopher and mathematician who made a significant contribution to the branch of mathematics Algebra .Decartes wished to use his mathematical knowlsdge to solve philosophica problems wich he called, He founded rationalism, the view that believe the basis for reliable knowledge lay in the mind ( knowledge comes from reason and logic). to Descartes knowledge that comes from our senses (i.e. empiricism) is not reliable. the only reliable and undoubtable knowledge is thinking (i.e. reasoning). “Cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am).

Rene Decartes is also The Father of Dualism. i.e. the belief that, reality or existence is composed of two separate entities, the mind (thought) and the body (matter ). according to Decartes, despite the fact that there is a continuous interaction between mind and body, the mind is independent, which can operate quite independent of the body while the body is dependent of mind.

René Descartes Quotes

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things

Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694)

Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694) was a powerful figure in the intellectual life of seventeenth-century Europe. He had a long and highly controversial career as a theologian, and was an able and influential philosopher. His writings were published and widely read over a period of more than fifty years and were assembled in 1775–1782 in forty-two large folio volumes.

Evaluations of Arnauld’s work as a theologian vary. Ian Hacking, for example, says that Arnauld was “perhaps the most brilliant theologian of his time” (Hacking 1975a, 25). Ronald Knox, on the other hand, says, “It was the fashion among the Jansenists to represent Antoine Arnauld as a great theologian; he should be remembered, rather as a great controversialist… A theologian by trade, Arnauld was a barrister by instinct” (Knox 1950, 196). It is agreed on all sides, however, that Arnauld was acute and learned in theology as well as in philosophy.

Blaise Pascal, (1623 — 1662)

He was an extraordinary talented person in the field of mathematics to practical inventions, however, his focus was on his spiritual quest. He propagated a religious doctrine that taught the experience of God through the heart rather than through reason, although
in his Pensées (1657–58), Pascal applied elements of game theory to show that belief in the Christian religion is rational.

Baruch Spinoza, (1632 – 1677)

Spinoza, was one of the most famous philosophers of the 17th century. For this reason, the 17th century is often known as the Baroque era. he was the first philosopher to challenge the Christian Bible through rational analysis. Spinoza argued that what the Bible says about the immortality of the soul and the resurrection is a lie and a myth. When Spinoza disparages the belief of Christians that God and Satan exists , he makes an argument that when a person wants something, he calls it good and when he doesn’t want it, he calls it bad. According to Christians, God is also perfect. Well then
If God is perfect, it means that God has no desire, there is no good or evil in him. In short, if something that is not of God is found by man, it is created by man.
Therefore, God is the creator of man and the creator of Satan is man.

spinoza was heavily influenced by Descartes philosophy but he also rejected Descartes dualism theory (i.e. the belief that, reality or existence is composed of two separate entities). According to Spinoza, every reality that exists can be reduced to only one single substance and that substance is called nature or God. (i.e.this philosophical belief is known as monism )

John Locke, (1632 – 1704)

John Locke the founder of philosophical empiricism was a British philosopher He believed that at birth human mind is a “tabula rasa” (Latin: meaning “clean slate” or empty). He argued the rationalists René Descartes , who believe some ideas and principles are inborn (innate) in the human mind. Locke argued that humans are not born with innate knowledge. but humans mind acquire knowledge from experience and observed(empirical) evidence.

Samuel von Pufendorf (1632–1694)

Samuel Freiherr von Pufendorf (1632–1694) was almost as unknown during most of the 19th and 20th centuries as he had been familiar during the preceding hundred years and more. His fate shows well how philosophical interests shape historical background narratives. More or less consciously, individual thinkers and the traditions they spawn frame themselves in terms of an edited past which – as in other forms of genealogy – they either appropriate, reject, revise, or ignore. Thus intellectual ancestry is always more controversial than biological inheritance, and the mere presence or absence of thinkers in particular developmental accounts is not necessarily an accurate indication of their actual historical role or importance.

Nicolas Malebranche (1638 – 1715)

Malebranche 1638 – 1715, six weeks after the great French monarch. Malebranche

The French Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche was hailed by his contemporary, Pierre Bayle, as “the premier philosopher of our age.” Over the course of his philosophical career, Malebranche published major works on metaphysics, theology, and ethics, as well as studies of optics, the laws of motion and the nature of color. He is known principally for offering a highly original synthesis of the views of his intellectual heroes, St. Augustine and René Descartes. Two distinctive results of this synthesis are Malebranche’s doctrine that we see bodies through ideas in God and his occasionalist conclusion that God is the only real cause.

Gottfried Leibniz,  (1646 – 1716)

Known as the Aristotle of the modern world, he was a thinker who wanted to fill the gap between the God-centered world and the rationalism caused by the scientific revolution, and was one of the two thinkers who invented differential and integral calculus.

He was always careful not to upset his employers, and therefore only published works that he knew would not cause great outrage. As an example, in his “Theodicy” he argued that among the infinite number of possible worlds that could have been created, God as the Absolute Being created the best. To explain the existence of evil in the best possible world, he claimed that a world with free will that makes even evil actions possible is better than a forced world without free will.

In his “Monadology”, he uses the term “Monas” (or units) to explain the fundamental elements of existence. He believed that the world is made up of many Monas. New readers compare this concept with atoms, but Leibniz considered each of these Monas to be a separate and independent small world, so that each of them reflects the entire universe. He also used the term “Vis Viva” as an attempt to describe the amount of motion, which today is known as Kinetic Energy.

Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)

Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), the “Philosopher of Rotterdam”, was a historian, literary critic, journalist, encyclopedist, French Protestant refugee, professor, and above all, philosopher. Although he is usually grouped today among the “minor figures” in the history of philosophy, Bayle was considered by the leading philosophers of his day as an equal, as one of the most erudite authors of his or any century. Upon Bayle’s death, G.W. Leibniz wrote: “he has departed from us, and such a loss is no small one, a writer whose learning and acumen few have equalled” (1710 [1952]: 68). The Preface to the Theodicy makes clear that it was Bayle who motivated Leibniz to write the only book he ever saw fit to publish. While Leibniz sought mainly to refute Bayle in that work, the next century of Enlightenment philosophes found inspiration in Bayle’s vast oeuvre. Bayle’s six-million word Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697; 1702) was so often cited in the eighteenth century that Ernst Cassirer has called it the “Arsenal of the Enlightenment”. Inventories of private European libraries have established the Dictionary as one of the bestsellers of its age. David Hume was clearly influenced by it; he told his friend Michael Ramsay in a letter of 1737 that if he wished to understand his writings

Juana Inés de la Cruz, (1651—1695)

She was a poet, scholar, dramatist, and a nun who devoted her life to scientific and philosophical studies and the creation of literary works, and in recent years, she is known as one of the symbols of feminism.

In her “Respuesta a Sor Filotea” (Reply to Sister Fiotella) she argued that throughout the Bible there is no trace of the prohibition of education for women, and on the other hand, education can increase women’s understanding of religious texts. However, the church authorities were critical of her activities, and the archbishop of Mexico, who was an opponent of the theater, accused her of disobedience. Due to these pressures, she was forced to leave her interests and had to sign her penance letter with her own blood. She finally sold all her books and scientific equipment and gave the money to the poor.

George Berkeley, (1685 –1753 )

He was a priest and philosopher who proposed the concept of Subjective Idealism and believed that material objects exist only in the form of perception.

He felt dissatisfied with John Locke’s materialistic implications. John Locke believed that objects enter our consciousness through sensory organs and when this sensory stimulation enters our consciousness, thought is produced in the mind. Berkeley was against this logic that could undermine the reasons for God’s existence. He considered Locke’s world to be a world that could act completely on its own without divine intervention. In such a world, the whole morality is at risk as there is no God.

Berkeley believed that the only reality we can be sure of is the one inside our mind. Our real world is the imagination we create in our mind. He went so far as to claim that material objects do not exist as long as they are not the direct object of our perception. If he were asked, “Does that table exist when no one is in the room?” He would say: “That table is always there because God is always looking at it.”

Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746)

Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) was an influential British moralist, an advocate of moral sentimentalism, and a key figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. While Hutcheson was educated, and completed his career, at the University of Glasgow, he was Irish by birth, and returned to Scotland only after his major writings (including the Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, the Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense) had been published, and in some cases extensively revised. Nevertheless, he had a tremendous influence on the Scottish intellectual scene, in part due to his interactions with important Scottish figures of the day, including Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and David Hume.

Voltaire, (1694–1778)

Voltaire was one of the key figures of the rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment and one of the founders of the modern liberal tradition. He was devoted to freedom of speech and thought, and a critic of the authority of religion and government.

Influenced by John Locke’s liberal philosophy, Isaac Newton’s science, and the freedom of speech and religious tolerance of Britain, in his book entitled “Letters on the English”, he praised the opponents of religion, Locke’s theory of knowledge based on evidence, and the freedom of science from religious prejudices. This book was banned, denounced and burned because of its anti-Catholic tendencies in Voltaire’s place of birth, France.

After the torture and execution of a French Protestant who was wrongly accused of murder, he wrote the “Treatise on Tolerance” and defended Deism (a belief in the existence of God, specifically in a creator who does not intervene in the universe after creating it, solely based on rational thought without any reliance on revealed religions or religious authority).

David Hume (1711–1776)

Hume conceived of philosophy as the inductive, experimental science of human nature. Taking the scientific method of the English physicist Sir Isaac Newton as his model and building on the epistemology of the English philosopher John Locke, Hume tried to describe how the mind works in acquiring what is called knowledge. He concluded that no theory of reality is possible; there can be no knowledge of anything beyond experience. Despite the enduring impact of his theory of knowledge, Hume seems to have considered himself chiefly as a moralist.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

Immanuel Kant is the central figure in modern philosophy. He synthesized rationalism and empiricism

rationalism and empiricism, Although both ideas are correct, they both have some shortcomings.
Rationalists has almost completely forgotten the benefits of experience and the empiricists have also forgotten, how much our brain influences us the way we observe things. therefore, to kant knowledge is a combination of thoughts and sensibility or intuitions (intuition is to understand something  without conscious thought or reasoning.

and continues to exercise a significant influence today in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and other fields. The fundamental idea of Kant’s “critical philosophy” – especially in his three Critiques: the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) – is human autonomy. He argues that the human understanding is the source of the general laws of nature that structure all our experience; and that human reason gives itself the moral law, which is our basis for belief in God, freedom, and immortality. Therefore, scientific knowledge, morality, and religious belief are mutually consistent and secure because they all rest on the same foundation of human autonomy, which is also the final end of nature according to the teleological worldview of reflecting judgment that Kant introduces to unify the theoretical and practical parts of his philosophical system.

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