This week, we commence the modern era of the history of philosophy with Descartes, Locke, and an introduction to the rationalism-empiricism debate.

Early modern philosophy was characterised primarily by debates on the nature of human experience and knowledge. Continental rationalists - like Descartes and Spinoza - were skeptical of sense experience but trusted “pure” reason, while the English empiricists - like Locke and Hume - believed that all knowledge comes from experience, that man is born tabula rasa, and that we can never get outside our own perceptual frame.

Meanwhile, everybody was concerned that the scientific discoveries of Newton, Copernicus and Galileo represented proof of a deterministic universe, devoid of free will. This posed a very serious problem for ethics; if our actions are determined by prior events, it was argued, how can we be morally responsible for them? What are the implications of this for law and politics?

This tension in epistemology and ethics culminated in the philosophic system of Immanuel Kant, who sought to integrate rationalism, empiricism and skepticism into a convincing, revolutionary philosophy.