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Per Étienne Gilson, ""philosophy is a collective enterprise in which no one can pretend to take part unless he is first properly introduced."" To provide that proper introduction vis-à-vis the modern period, Gilson and Langan move systematically through the landmark figures and ideas of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Beginning with the vestiges of medievalism in Montaigne and Bacon, they then cover the interplay of science and philosophy (Descartes, Newton, and Vico); the emergence of a new political ethos (Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau); the installation of the golden age of modern metaphysics (Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff); the juxtaposition of materialism with idealism (Newton, Berkeley, and Hume); the Christian reaction (Pascal and Gerdil); and the rise of Romanticism (Lessing, Herder and Kant). With its emphasis on the doctrinal content of each philosopher, braced by healthy portions of biographical detail, Modern Philosophy is a comprehensive treatment of what it has meant and what it means to philosophize, the ambitious breadth of which is matched only by its absorbing depth.

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Etienne Gilson (1884-1978) was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy. Along with Jacques Maritain, he led the twentieth-century revival of Thomist thought. Over the course of a prolific career, Gilson was professor at the University of Lille, the University of Strasbourg, the University of Paris; lectured at Harvard University, University of Montreal, and University of Virginia; inaugurated the chair in history of medieval philosophy at the Collège de France; and instituted the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies with St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto. Gilson is the author of more than nine hundred works, including Being and Some Philosophers, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, and Painting and Reality.

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