ABSTRACT
The historical foundations of artificial intelligence (AI) lay not only in the work of those interested in formalizing reasoning through logic. The foundations of the modern approach to AI were laid by philosophers who were concerned with general characterizations of human understanding. It is generally agreed among historians of philosophy that the era of modern philosophy began with the seventeenth century. The falling apart of the theology/philosophy syntheses mentioned by F. C. Copleston proceeded during the European Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Thomas Hobbes, a British contemporary of Descartes who lived from 1588 until 1679, was less concerned than Descartes with rationally deriving theological truths, and more concerned with politics and ethics. Some early modern philosophers wanted to maintain dualism, but not the interactionist variety advocated by Descartes. Spinoza's monism is sometimes called double-aspect theory, because it characterizes mind and matter as two aspects of a substance which is in essence neither mental nor material.
