The Seventeenth Century : THE AGE OF INDIVIDUALITY.

The article focuses on the European intellectual history of the seventeenth century. Notable people considered include French philosophers Rene Descartes and Blaise Pascal, English philosophers Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibnitz, and Jewish-Dutch philosopher Benedictus de Spinoza. Topics considered include Protestant sectarianism, universal determinism, rationalism, theories of knowledge and the mind, social contracts and theories of the State, and Deism.