Claude Buffier
(1661–1737)French Jesuit whose aim was to show how experience requires interpretation in terms of an external world, thereby countering the sceptical tendencies inherent in the philosophies of ...
Jean Le Rond D'Alembert
(1717–83)French mathematician and philosopher. Although he achieved his distinction as a mathematician, in philosophy d'Alembert is remembered as one of the greatest figures of the French ...
Montesquieu
Charles, Second Baron of Brede and Montesquieu (1689–1755), French philosopher and jurist. Montesquieu studied Locke while in England and returned to France to write about the British Constitution, ...
progress
The idea of progress, conceived as the increasing sophistication of knowledge and the improving quality of life, has been the driving force of Western civilization for at least three hundred years. ...
Ralph Cudworth
(1617–80).Belonged to the Cambridge Platonists, a school which drew on Plato to assert the primacy of mind as ‘senior to the world, and the architect thereof’. Cudworth's major work ...
