Free A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition by Unknown Author Page A

1696). Culminating in the writings of Voltaire, Diderot and d’Alembert, this movement has gained international status in the eyes of the intellectual historian. But it remains decidedly French in its tone and manners. Clear, elegant, haughty and ironical, the ‘philosophes’, as they came to be known, stand at the end of a century in which intellectual, political and moral revolutions had upset the authority of Church and State, and humbled in their eyes all mortals whose pretensions to eminence could be backed neither by reason nor by experiment. Most of the philosophes had their intellectual roots in Cartesian scepticism; but by now this scepticism, separated from the intellectual accomplishment of the metaphysics which stemmed from it, had become a literary device, a means to sustain a detached attitude of rational unbelief, while treating of matters that could allow neither systematic development nor the easy extraction of a moral.
    The philosophes and the figures of the literary Enlightenment, authors of literary masterpieces as diverse as Voltaire’s Le Siècle de Louis XIV and Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau, would not have existed but for the decades of Cartesian metaphysics which cleared the intellectual air for them. Nevertheless, they play an insignificant part in the history of philosophy, neither adding to nor subtracting from the metaphysical ideas which their urbane scepticism made it more agreeable to them to ridicule than to understand. No doubt it is a further tribute to Descartes that his method should transmute itself into so many literary forms. But the history of philosophy proceeded independently, returning to the legacy of Descartes with a spirit which he would have recognised, but which was not his own.

5 -  SPINOZA
    Benedict de (Baruch) Spinoza (1632-1677), like Descartes and Leibniz, was a philosopher immersed in mathematical and scientific investigation. The greatest single influence on his thought was Descartes; he corresponded with men of science, such as Oldenburg (secretary to the newly formed Royal Society) and Boyle, and became an acknowledged expert in the science of optics, making his living (according to some accounts) as a lens-grinder. He was educated at the Jewish College in Amsterdam, to which city his Jewish parents had come from Portugal to escape persecution. Excommunicated from the synagogue for his sceptical beliefs, he settled among a group of enlightened Christians, who had formed a philosophical circle of which he soon became the leader. Then, leaving Amsterdam, he lived a secluded unworldly existence, refused offers of money and academic distinctions, and even withheld his great Ethics from the press, as much from love of truth and intellectual independence as from any fear of the censor. He died of consumption, leaving his major work unpublished.
    Spinoza’s philosophy rests on two principles. First, a rationalist theory of knowledge, according to which what is ‘adequately’ conceived is for that reason true; secondly, a notion of substance, inherited through Descartes from the Aristotelian tradition of which Descartes himself was the unwilling heir. From the standpoint of metaphysics it is perhaps Spinoza’s greatest distinction that he examined this notion of substance, and refused to let it go until he had extracted from it every particle of philosophical meaning.
    Like Descartes, Spinoza sought for what is certain, and regarded the pursuit of certainty as providing the only guarantee of human knowledge. However, unlike Descartes, he did not seek to found his system in the single indubitable premise of the ‘cogito’. The proposition ‘I think’ has two features which rendered it useless to Spinoza. First, it expresses a merely contingent truth, whereas for Spinoza all certainty must ultimately be founded in necessities. Secondly, it contains an ineliminable reference to the first person, while for Spinoza access to philosophical truth comes only when we rise