ABSTRACT
The history of early modern philosophy consists of a diversity of opinions, but it can be characterized initially by philosophers’ selfconscious break with the Aristotelianism that dominated the Middle Ages. Although Aristotelianism had reigned for hundreds of years, philosophy had failed to achieve unanimity on any of the most important philosophical questions. Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz draw a number of specific conclusions from the Rene Descartes’s rational method, and they disagree on a number of points, but most of them are not important for understanding the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Spinoza and Leibniz go beyond Descartes, however, in adapting mathematical reasoning more methodically to a treatment of philosophical and metaphysical subject matter. The split between empiricism and rationalism dominated the philosophical atmosphere in which Kant initially found himself, and these two approaches played important roles in the development of his own position.
