As a scholar of early modern philosophy, I regularly teach early modern survey courses. Until last year, I worked at The Ohio State University, where the early modern survey is split into two courses: one for the seventeenth and one for the eighteenth century. Because UMass Amherst, my current institution, instead offers a one-semester early modern survey, I recently had to rethink the way I teach this material.
My main goal in designing the one-semester survey of Early Modern Philosophy was to find a good balance between two desiderata: (i) introduce students to the most influential authors and arguments of the period — such as Descartes’s Cogito and Hume’s inductive skepticism — but also (ii) include some of the early modern authors and debates that are not part of the traditional canon but that have started receiving more scholarly attention in recent years. The second desideratum is very important to me, for a variety of reasons. First, I don’t want students to get the false impression that all worthwhile early modern philosophers were white European men. Second, I have consistently found that many students are particularly engaged when discussing texts and arguments that aren’t part of the traditional canon. Third, nearly all of the most exciting scholarship in early modern philosophy in recent years focuses on non-canonical figures and topics. I want to reflect these important developments in my survey course. And fourth, I want to acknowledge that the early modern period is marked not only by technological and intellectual achievements but also by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, and the closely related development of a new understanding of human diversity in terms of distinct races. Hence, I find it important to include portions of the early modern debates about slavery and race.
To balance these desiderata, I decided to organize my survey course thematically, rather than chronologically. A thematic approach allows me to cover more authors, because it removes the pressure of needing to give students an overview of each philosopher’s entire system. Moreover, it nicely highlights the conversations among early modern philosophers on specific topics. The benefits of this approach, I believe, outweigh its shortcomings.
The course I came up with is divided into three thematic units. The first unit is titled “How Should We Live?” and as the name suggests, it focuses on ethics. In this unit, the class discusses happiness and the good life, hedonism, egoism, the relation between happiness and morality, love, moral motivation, and finally two early modern theories about the moral (im)permissibility of slavery. The second unit, “What Can We Know?,” is on epistemology. It includes discussions of Descartes’s method of doubt, applications of rationalist principles to religious and cultural traditions, Locke’s empiricist approach to knowledge, and Hume’s skepticism about induction. The third and final unit, “What Are We Like?,” focuses on philosophy of mind and metaphysics. It examines the mind-body problem, substance dualism and monism, the differences between humans and animals, the self and personal identity, as well as race and gender. For the discussion of early modern theories of race and gender, we look among other things at the ways in which Cartesian substance dualism can be used to reject essential differences, and at some early modern racial classification systems.
Even within each unit, the readings are not in chronological order, but rather in an order that made the most pedagogical and philosophical sense to me. For instance, I start the first unit with a text by Emilie du Châtelet that was composed later than any of the other texts, but that works extremely well as an introduction to the early modern debate about the good life.
The course’s three units are less disjoint than they might initially seem—as I stress in my lectures, these different philosophical issues were intimately connected for early modern philosophers. To name just one example, the theories of happiness and the good life from unit 1 have very close connections to the theories about the relation between mind and body in unit 3.
I’ve only taught the course in this new way once so far (with some modifications because of the Covid-19 shutdown), and I’ll probably keep tweaking it. One nice thing about the thematic approach is that it is very easy to swap out topics, authors, or readings here and there. Yet, I was very happy with the way the first version of the class went. Judging by my students’ chosen paper topics, they were most interested in Conway’s views on the relation between humans and animals, Leibniz’s theory of disinterested love as well as his arguments concerning slavery, Du Châtelet’s theory of happiness, and Descartes’s views about animals. The discussions about race and gender were also extremely lively, but unfortunately they occurred after the students had already chosen paper topics. Next time, I might move those topics to a slightly earlier date.
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Julia Jorati
Julia Jorati is an Associate Professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research area is the history of early modern philosophy. In her book Leibniz on Causation and Agency (Cambridge University Press 2017), she explores the connections between Leibniz’s fundamental ontology and his philosophy of action.
