The Routledge Companion to Seventeenth Century Philosophy

Claims for any chronologically defined period can be made and disputed, yet the claim for innovative forms of thinking during the seventeenth century (in Europe, the focus of this work) is a sound one. The “big names” that keep coming up are Descartes and Locke, Hobbes and Leibniz, Malebranche and Spinoza and Newton, of course, although it is clear that their work was shaped by the intellectual history before them (above all by the ways in which Aristotelian and other ideas fed through Scholasticism), it arose in a context with a constellation of other writers (like Gassendi, Digby, Montaigne, Bayle,...