The Birth of the Modern Mind: The Intellectual History of the 17th and 18th Centuries

Learn about the age of Newton, Descartes, Pascal, Locke, Rousseau, and more from one of world’s leading intellectual historians.

• By This Professor
• 01: Introduction—Intellectual History and Conceptual Change
• 02: The Dawn of the 17th Century—Aristotelian Scholasticism
• 03: The New Vision of Francis Bacon
• 04: The New Astronomy and Cosmology
• 05: Descartes's Dream of Perfect Knowledge
• 06: The Specter of Thomas Hobbes
• 07: Skepticism and Jansenism—Blaise Pascal
• 08: Newton's Discovery
• 09: The Newtonian Revolution
• 10: John Locke—The Revolution in Knowledge
• 11: The Lockean Moment
• 12: Skepticism and Calvinism—Pierre Bayle
• 13: The Moderns—The Generation of 1680-1715
• 14: Introduction to Deism
• 15: The Conflict Between Deism and Christianity
• 16: Montesquieu and the Problem of Relativism
• 17: Voltaire—Bringing England To France
• 18: Bishop Joseph Butler and God's Providence
• 19: The Skeptical Challenge to Optimism—David Hume
• 20: The Assault upon Philosophical Optimism—Voltaire
• 21: The Philosophes—The Triumph of the French Enlightenment
• 22: Beccaria and Enlightened Reform
• 23: Rousseau's Dissent
• 24: Materialism & Naturalism—The Boundaries of the Enlightenment