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
Thomas Baldwin (philosopher) Deputy Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. He was Chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics Working Party on "Novel Neurotechnologies" (2013). Thomas Baldwin (philosopher) Thomas R. Baldwin (born 1947) is a British philosopher and has been a professor of philosophy at the University of York since 1995. He has written generally on 20th century Analytic and Continental philosophy, as well as bioethics, the philosophy of language and of mind, particularly with regard to G. E. Moore, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Bertrand Russell. Baldwin studied at Cambridge University, gaining an MA and a PhD before lecturing at Makerere University