The Baroque

Major Representative Philosophers: Thomas Hobbes, Leibniz, René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, John Locke, George Berkeley



Classification: Materialism (Hobbes), Rationalism (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) Empiricism (Locke, Berkeley, Hume)


Meaning: Materialism is a philosophy that all real things come from material substances. Rationalism is the belief in human reason. Empiricism is the belief in human senses.






Thomas Hobbes: believed that everything in the world was made up of particles of matter. Even the soul comes from the movement of particles in the brain.


Leibniz: believed that the material world could be broken up but the soul was not divisible.


Descartes: father of Modern Philosophy. He tried to answer all the major questions of philosophy in one, cohesive system. He was concerned with the relationship between the body and mind, and what we can know or “certain knowledge.” He believed that spirit and matter were completely separate. He also believed that we cannot know things unless we can perceive them. He believed that we could prove the existence of God simply because we could not have the idea of God if God did not exist. He believed in two forms of reality, through (mind) and extension (matter). He believed that they were independent of each other. Man, however, has both thought and matter because man has a mind and body. He said the human body is the perfect machine. He believed that the mind and body are linked through a special brain organ.


Spinoza: denied that the Bible was inspired by God; instead, he proposed a critical reading of the Bible. He identified nature with God. He believed that “God is all, and all is in God.” He believed that in order to be happy, we need to be free of our feelings. He believed in one reality, called substance. Everything in the world can be reduced to one single substance. God manifests himself as both thought and matter, though. He believed that God is the inner cause of everything that happens, because everything that happens happens out of necessity. He believed that outer circumstances influence our growth. He also believed that man does not control everything. He said that we can only achieve true happiness if we realize that everything is one.


Locke: was concerned with where we get our ideas from and if we can rely on our senses. He believed that before we are born, our mind is an empty slate. As we experience things, we form complex ideas. Repeated experiences allow us to identify and know things. He believed that we also learn things because of thinking, reasoning, and doubting. He established primary (unchanging) and secondary (subject to opinion) qualities. He believed in natural rights. He believed that we could prove the existence of God through reason. He advocated equality of the sexes and division of power.


Hume: wanted to return to a “spontaneous experience of the world.” He believed that we form complex ideas of things that do not really exist—we put wings on humans and call them angels, but we must rid ourselves of these ideas because they can’t be proven by reason. He felt that man had both impressions (“the immediate sensation of external reality”) and ideas (“recollection of such impressions”). He believed that we can only form complex ideas if we have experienced their simpler counterparts. For example, we can have a complex idea of heaven because we have experienced pearly gates and gold. Hume opposed ideas if they could not be traced back to something we are able to perceive with our senses. Hume shared a lot of similarities with Buddha in that he also believed that humans are constantly changing. He was an agnostic—he didn’t believe that humans could answer the question of whether God exists. He believed that we cannot ever be sure that something will always happen, even if we have experienced it many times. He also didn’t believe in the law of causality—he didn’t believe that there was a link between an action that follows another. He felt that we do things because of feelings, not reason. He did not believe that we can use reason to tell us how to act.

John Locke

Berkeley: believed that “the only things that exist are those we perceive.” He thought that all of our ideas have a spiritual cause, and the spirit is God. He felt that “everything we see and feel is an effect of God’s power.” He finally came to the conclusion that we exist only in the mind of God. He questioned whether time and space really existed. He believed that “all we can know is that we are spirit.”