Rationalists

Seventeenth-century rationalism is the attempt to figure out what reality is really made of using reason alone, and this course works through that project by reading Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz alongside often-overlooked contemporaries like Cavendish, Conway, and du Châtelet. You'll spend the semester close-reading the Meditations, the Ethics, and the Monadology, arguing about substance, mind-body, and freedom in class, and defending your own readings in two term essays plus regular Perusall annotations. It pairs naturally with the Empiricists sequel and gives you the metaphysical vocabulary that later courses in philosophy of mind and early modern thought assume you already have.