Introduction: How modern is 'Modern' philosophy?
Rene Descartes
Material Monism or the Great Soup of Being: Descartes' account of the natural world
The possibility of atheism: Descartes and God
The limits of mechanism: the place of human beings in Descartes' world
Selling the picture: Descartes' story of doubt and discovery
Baruch Spinoza
God, or Nature? Spinoza's pantheism
The attribute of thought
Spinoza's ethics: metaphysics and the life of man
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
The Principle of Sufficient Reason
The best of all possible worlds
The world as explicable: Monadology
Matter, mind and human life: the world as monadic
John Locke
On living in the world: Locke on the contents of the mind
Locke on nature (and our knowledge of it)
The life of man: Locke's political thought
George Berkeley
Denying the obvious: Berkeley's radical reinterpretation of human experience
Berkeley's disproof of the existence of matter
David Hume
Hume's project for a new science: what it is, how it works, and an example
The failure of the project
The lessons of Hume: where do we go from here?