History and Texts of Philosophy of Modern Times

Teacher(s)

Maesschalck Marc; Schmutz Jacob;

Language

French
> English-friendly

Prerequisites

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Main themes

The course is intended as an introduction to the study of texts and doctrines of modern philosophy.

It identifies the main aspects of the history of modern philosophy, its key trends and prominent thinkers, and will develop students' critical reading of the great works of modern philosophy. Authors studied will include Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Kant and Hegel.

Learning outcomes

At the end of this learning unit, the student is able to :
1	By the end of the course, students will be familiar with the major movements and significant writers of modern philosophy, and will be able to identify its key underlying issues and describe the important ongoing debates. They will be able to comment on, analyse and critique one or more major modern philosophy texts and situate them in the overall context of modern philosophy, from Bacon and Descartes to Hegel.

Content

Transformations of Knowledge in Early-Modern Philosophy
Course taught this year by Prof. Jacob Schmutz, Q1 2022
Early-modern philosophy is often presented as a new departure, as symbolized by the famous image of a ship crossing the columns of Hercules on the title page of Francis Bacon's Instauratio magna (1620). During this class, we will try to evaluate this classical image of early-modern philosophy and try to appreciate what was really new, and what might well be just old wine in new bottles. We will therefore try to understand early-modern philosophy by comparing it with late medieval and Renaissance aristotelianism, starting with a study of various texts on the definition and division of knowledge or science in the seventeenth century. We will look in particular at the changing status of logic, which was the classical entry door to philosophy, which ceases to be conceived as a formal organon to become a quasi-psychological theory of mental acts. We will also look at the transformation of the queen of all sciences, metaphysics, from its classical definition as science of being qua being to its eighteenth century redefinition as philosophical psychology or science of consciousness. We will be reading key texts chosen from Bacon, Descartes, Malebranche, Locke and Hume in particular, confronting them to lesser know scholastic authors. Students will be introduced in the methods of historical research, by looking the material conditions of early-modern philosophy (lectures, manuscripts, printed works). At the end of this class, students will have developed a complete cartography of various currents of early-modern philosophy, they will be able to understand the specific tasks of logic, psychology and metaphysics, and they will be able to provide definitions of important concepts in theory of knowledge (act of the mind, consciousness, certainty and evidence, idea, abstraction, universals, principles, etc.)

Teaching methods

The sessions will be divided into a section dedicated to the explanation of tradition and concepts of early-modern philosophy and the reading and analysis of relevant passages.

Evaluation methods

Oral final exam, based on pre-distributed questions.
A mid-term written exam will account for 30% of the final grade.

Other information

English-friendly course: course taught in French but offering facilities in English.

Bibliography

Un dossier de textes originaux, une chronologie, une bibliographie spécialisée et un dossier iconographique seront fournis aux étudiants en début de semestre et complétés au fur et à mesure.
Quelques usuels utiles :
Ariew, Roger; Des Chene, Dennis; Jesseph, Douglas M.; Schmaltz, Tad M.; Verbeek, Theo (2015), Historical Dictionary of Descartes and Cartesian Philosophy, 2nd edition, Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield.
Ayers, Michael ; Garber, Dan (1998, eds), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth Century Philosophy, Cambridge : CUP, 2 vols.
Foisneau, Luc (2015, ed.), Dictionnaire des philosophes français du XVIIe siècle, Paris : Classiques Garnier, 2 vols
Schobinger, Jean-Pierre (ed.), Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie. Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, vol. II : Frankreich und Niederlande, Bâle : Schwabe
Un manuel très ancien, toujours recommandable à titre de cadre général : celui du P. Gaston Sortais SJ (1922), La philosophie moderne depuis Bacon jusqu’à Leibniz. Etudes historiques, Paris : Lethielleux, 2 vols.
Quelques ouvrages de synthèse auxquels il sera fait référence :
Ariew, Roger (2011), Descartes among the Scholastics, Leiden : Brill
Courtine, Jean-François (1990), Suárez et le système de la métaphysique, Paris : PUF.
Feingold, Mordechai ; Freedman, Joseph S. ; Rother, Wolfgang (2001, eds), The Influence of Petrus Ramus. Studies in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Philosophy and Sciences, Bâle: Schwabe.
Gouhier, Henri (1978), La pensée métaphysique de Descartes, Paris : Vrin.
Marion, Jean-Luc (1975), Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes. Science cartésienne et savoir aristotélicien dans les Regulae, Paris : Vrin.
Moreau, Denis, Deux cartésiens. La polémique entre Antoine Arnauld et Nicolas Malebranche, Paris : Vrin.
Pasnau, Robert (2011), Metaphysical Themes, 1274-1671, Oxford : OUP.
Popkin, Richard (1995), Histoire du scepticisme d’Erasme à Spinoza, trad. Ch. Hivet, Paris : PUF.
Schmaltz, Tad (2002), Radical Cartesianism. The French Reception of Descartes, Cambridge : CUP.
Sgarbi, Marco (2012), The Aristotelian Tradition and the Rise of British Empiricism. Logic and Epistemology in the British Isles (1570-1689), Dordrecht : Kluwer.
Secada, Jorge (2000), Cartesian Metaphysics. The Scholastic Origins of Modern Philosophy, Cambridge : CUP.

Faculty or entity

EFIL