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
Leo the Mathematician Thucydides. He composed his own medical encyclopaedia. Later Byzantine scholars sometimes confused Leo with the scholar Leo Choirosphaktes and the emperor Leo VI the Wise, and ascribe to him oracles. Leo the Mathematician Leo the Mathematician or the Philosopher ( or ὁ Φιλόσοφος, "Léōn ho Mathēmatikós" or "ho Philósophos"; c. 790 – after 869) was a Byzantine philosopher and logician associated with the Macedonian Renaissance and the end of the Second Byzantine Iconoclasm. His only preserved writings are some notes contained in manuscripts of Plato's dialogues. He has been called a "true Renaissance man" and "the cleverest man in Byzantium