Modern philosophy will determine the scope of one's use of "modern philosophy." How much of Renaissance intellectual history is part of modern philosophy is disputed: the Early Renaissance is often considered less modern and more medieval compared to the later High Renaissance. By the 17th and 18th centuries the major figures in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaphysics were roughly divided into two main groups. The "Rationalists," mostly in France and Germany, argued all knowledge must begin from certain "innate ideas" in the mind. Major rationalists were Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, and Nicolas Malebranche. The "Empiricists," by contrast, held that knowledge
Theosophy and Western philosophy a "pseudo-Theosophical" Society, because hers teaching "is untenable and false." Thus, modern Theosophy is a doctrine not only "anti-religious" and "anti-scientific," but also "antiphilosophic." A religious philosopher Sergius Bulgakov stated that [Blavatskian] Theosophy, trying to replace religion with itself, turns into a "vulgar pseudoscientific mythology." In Nikolai Berdyaev's opinion, "contemporary 'theosophical' movements" corrupted the beautiful word 'Theosophy' and "have made us forget" the existence of a genuine "Christian theosophy". He believed that modern Theosophy does not represent a synthesis of religion, philosophy and science, as its adherents say, but there is a "mixture" of them, in which there is no