THE 15 MOST IMPORTANT MODERN PHILOSOPHERS (MODERN AGE) - PHILOSOPHY - 2025

Among modern philosophers most important are René Descartes, John Locke and Denis Diderot, among many others. It is a group of characters born between the 15th and 18th centuries; this spans roughly from 1453 (fall of Constantinople) to 1775 (independence from the United States).

The Modern Age gave way to great changes in the sciences, arts and philosophy, among other disciplines. The thought that God was the center of everything was left behind and man became the center of reason.

Another great influential factor in the changes of this period and in the birth of this new group of philosophers is the union of cultures that occurred in the Modern Age. Among other factors, this union occurred as a result of the discovery of America and Australia.

The four great currents of philosophical thought in the Modern Age were rationalism, empiricism, enlightenment and idealism.

The 15 most outstanding modern philosophers

Rene Descartes

René Descartes is one of the most prominent modern philosophers in history. Source: wikipedia.org

Descartes was a French philosopher. He was born in 1596 and was the first and most important philosopher of the Modern Age. Descartes is said to be the father of rationalism, since he focused his thinking on reason and the "I" as the center of everything; "I think, therefore I am" is his most famous phrase.

Among the great contributions of Descartes to science stands out the union of geometry with algebra, thus introducing a new coordinate system called Cartesian.

His most important work is Discourse on Method, a philosophical treatise in which he establishes a series of rules, steps or methodology to know what to look for; This book raises how to get to knowledge in a structured way, as is done in mathematics or algebra.

Descartes suffered all his life, as he was in very fragile health. He died in Sweden in 1650 at the age of 54 from a lung problem.

Baruch spinoza

Spinoza was a Dutch-born philosopher born in Amsterdam in 1632. He was of Hebrew origin and was expelled from the synagogue for being one of the first to harshly criticize religion, as well as for believing in science.

He had a great influence from Descartes, but unlike him, he considered only the existence of God in nature. In many cases he identified a close relationship between God and nature, so it may seem that he regarded them as the same.

He considered himself a monist; This means that he did not believe in the existence of body and soul, he only believed in matter.

He died in 1677 in The Hague at the age of 44. Like Descartes, the cause of death was a lung condition.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Leibniz

Leibniz was a German-born philosopher who was born in 1646 and who also developed in disciplines such as science and mathematics, among others.

Along with Descartes and Spinoza, he was one of the representatives of rationalism. Among his greatest achievements (if not the greatest of these) was the discovery of the infinitesimal calculus and the binary system. The infinitesimal calculus synthesizes the concepts of derivative and integral, notions that today are fundamental in the study of mathematics.

He starred in one of the greatest scientific disputes of the Modern Age, since the discovery of the infinitesimal calculus was attributed to Isaac Newton, 10 years before Leibniz pointed it out; even today it is unknown who was the author of that discovery.

Leibniz died of gout in Hannover, Germany, in 1716. At the time of his death this philosopher was 70 years old.

John Locke

Portrait of John Locke

Locke was born in England in 1632, he is the father of liberalism and was one of the main exponents of empiricism.

His political thinking already supported the separation of powers at that time; He said that the power of the State comes from a social pact and not from a divine way like the monarchy. Locke died in 1704 at the age of 72.

In his empirical philosophical thought he defended the idea that all our knowledge comes from experience; He said there was nothing innate in us. He categorically rejected rational philosophical thought, since for him all reason came from empirical facts.

Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes was one of the representatives of modern philosophy. Source: John Michael Wright

Hobbes was an English philosopher born in 1588. Along with Locke, he belongs to the philosophical current of empiricism. His most important work is The Leviathan.

This philosopher had an absolutist thought of politics. Like Locke, he believed in the social contract, but Hobbes said that people had to reach an agreement with the sovereign to transfer unlimited powers to him, and thus guarantee order and peace in society.

Hobbes died in England in 1679 at the age of 91. The cause of death was a stroke.

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon

He was born in London in 1561 and is considered the father of English empiricism. His father was an important member of the politics of his day, and upon his death, Bacon held great positions within the government; this prevented him from developing his philosophical thinking as he wanted while he had the obligation to exercise them.

According to Bacon, the truth can only be reached through empirical facts. He developed the inductive method to arrive at the truth and to explain how reasoning must be based on experience.

He died in London in 1626 from pneumonia. During his last years he was involved in controversy since he was accused of corruption.

Voltaire

Portrait of Voltaire, French thinker (1694-1778)

His real name was François-Marie Arouet, but he was known as Voltaire (the origin of this name is unknown with certainty). He was born in Paris in 1694 and was one of the great representatives of the Enlightenment. He died in Paris in 1778 at the age of 83.

He was of liberal thought and defended above all things the right of men to defend their ideas.

He was branded an atheist but he really was not, he only promulgated that belief in God should be based on reason and not on divine facts. For this very reason he was against absolutism and God's intervention in human affairs.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau

He was born in Switzerland in 1712 and was one of the most recognized representatives of the Enlightenment. His thought was a precursor of Romanticism and the French Revolution, and he was one of the creators of pedagogy. He died in France in 1778 at the age of 66.

His work The Social Contract laid the foundations of democracy. Rousseau strongly criticized absolutism; not in vain his ideas were great triggers of the French Revolution.

Immanuel Kant

A German philosopher, he was born in the Russian city of Königsberg in 1724. He was the last of the philosophers of the Modern Age and his thinking is identified with German idealism. He died in Königsberg in 1804 at the age of 79.

Kant wrote three very important works: Critique of Pure Reason, in which he studied reason and how it is structured; Critique of practical reason, where he studied ethics; and Critique of Judgment, a work in which he studied aesthetics and metaphysics.

His thinking also played an important role in the development of pedagogy. His study of human subjectivity defines people as part of educational processes.

Kant found in his studies a middle ground between empiricism and the Enlightenment. He said that, although there is a part of the reason that comes from experience, there is another very important that comes from the subjective elements of the human mind that have nothing to do with lived experiences.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770. His philosophical thought is within German idealism.

Although he himself tried not to identify with any of his predecessors' philosophical thoughts, he identified himself as an absolute idealist. Hegel's thought has always been considered to be a great influence on Marx's work.

He devised a system of understanding of things called dialectic, through which a current event is understood by the resolution of the contradictions of the events prior to this.

In his metaphysical thought, Hegel divided thought into three parts. The first is a merely rational phase, in which the being is observed as it appears.

Then a second phase stands out in which the being is subjectively analyzed, beyond its simple physical appearance. Finally, the third phase receives the name of ontological, through which it is asked what one's own being should be.

Hegel died in 1832 in the city of Berlin at the age of 61. He was the victim of a cholera epidemic.

Nicolas Malebranche

Malebranche was a philosopher born in the city of Paris - then the kingdom of France - in 1638. He was born into a very religious family, which is why he was influenced by life at the service of the Church and was ordained a priest in 1664.

His thought was nourished by the ideas of Descartes and Saint Augustine, and from these he created his own personal doctrine called occasionalism, according to which God is the only true doctrine.

For Malebranche, things are a reflection of what God wants us to see. Things do not exist in themselves but exist in God, so that the human participates in God and, consequently, participates in things. His most important work was The Search for Truth.

Throughout his life Malebranche was a person of very fragile health. He died in Paris in 1715 at the age of 77.

David hume

Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711. Like his predecessors Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke, he was one of the great exponents of English empiricism, the last of the Modern Age. Hume died of cancer in Edinburgh in 1775 at the age of 65.

This philosopher separated thought into two aspects: impressions and ideas. The impressions are the perceptions of the real events that we experience, and the ideas are those that are generated as a result of these impressions. Hume rejected any form of idea that did not come from impressions.

Currently his work Treatise of human nature is one of the most studied books of philosophy; however, it was not very successful at the time of publication.

George Berkeley

Berkeley was born in Ireland in 1685. The Californian city of Berkeley owes its name to this philosopher, as well as the famous university.

His philosophical thought was empiricism taken to another level. For him there was only what we can perceive based on experience; therefore, he rejected anything other than what he really experienced.

He was a very religious man and, despite his empiricist thinking, he believed that there were things out of the ordinary; he found this explanation in God. Berkeley died at Oxford in 1753 at the age of 67 from heart failure.

Denis Diderot

French philosopher born in 1713. He is remembered among other things for his work The Encyclopedia. He died in Paris in 1784 at the age of 70.

Due to his criticism of religion, he suffered reprisals and persecution. According to Diderot, God did not exist; therefore, no deity influenced the morals of man. For him, morals were determined by the pursuit of happiness.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu

Better known as Montesquieu, he was a philosopher and jurist born in France in 1689. His thought belongs to the Enlightenment period and his most important work was The Spirit of Laws.

Montesquieu's political thought on the separation of powers established that there should be a clear separation between the Executive, Legislative and Judicial Power, and said that the laws and the system of government of the countries should take into account economic and social factors. and even the weather.

His doctrine on the separation of powers still persists in time and served as an influence in the creation of the Constitution of the United States.

Montesquieu lost his sight until he was totally blind and died of fever in Paris in 1755. He was 66 years old.

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