17th-century philosophy in the West is generally regarded as seeing the start of modern philosophy, and the shaking off of the mediæval approach, especially scholasticism.

Europe

In Western Philosophy, the modern period is usually taken to start with the seventeenth century — more specifically, with the work of René Descartes, who set much of the agenda as well as much of the methodology for those who came after him. The period is typified in Europe by the great system-builders — philosophers who present unified systems of epistemology, metaphysics, logic, and ethics, and often politics and the physical sciences too.

Kant was to classify his predecessors into two schools: the Rationalists and the Empiricists, and Early Modern Philosophy (as seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy is known) is often characterised in terms of a supposed conflict between these schools. This division is a considerable oversimplification, and it's important to be aware that the philosophers involved didn't think of themselves as belonging to these schools, but as being involved in a single philosophical enterprise.

Although misleading in many ways, this classification has continued to be used to this day. The three main Rationalists are normally taken to have been Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz, while the three main Empiricists were John Locke, and in the eighteenth century George Berkeley and David Hume. The former were distinguished by the belief that, in principle (though not in practice), all knowledge can be gained by the power of our reason alone; the latter rejected this, believing that all knowledge has to come through the senses, from experience. Thus the Rationalists took mathematics as their model for knowledge, and the Empiricists took the physical sciences.

This emphasis on epistemology is at the root of Kant's distinction; looking at the various philosophers in terms of their metaphyical, moral, or linguistic theories, they divide up very differently. Even sticking to epistemology, though, the distinction is shaky: for example, most of the Rationalists accepted that in practice we had to rely on the sciences for knowledge of the external world, and many of them were involved in scientific research; the Empiricists, on the other hand, generally accepted that a priori knowledge was possible in the fields of maths and logic, and of the main three, only Locke has any scientific training or expertise.

This period also saw the birth of some of the classics of political thought, especially Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, Locke's Two Treatises of Government, and Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu's L'Esprit des Lois.

The seventeenth century in Europe saw the culmination of the slow process of detachment of philosophy from theology. Thus, while philosophers still talked about – and even offered arguments for the existence of – god, this was done in the service of philosophical argument and thought. (In the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, eighteenthth-century philosophy was to go still further, leaving theology and religion behind altogether.)

List of 17th-century philosophers

(Still very incomplete)

• Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
• Marin Mersenne (1588–1648)
• Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)
• Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655)
• René Descartes (1596–1650)
• Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694)
• Wang fu-zi (1619–1693)
• Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
• Anne Conway (1631–1679)
• Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677)
• John Locke (1632–1704)
• Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715)
• Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716)
• Giambattista Vico (1668–1744)