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
Warren Goldfarb Warren Goldfarb Warren David Goldfarb (born 1949) is a philosopher and mathematician with a specialization in the history of analytic philosophy and in logic, most notably his work on the classical decision problem (see his book on the subject, "The decision problem: Solvable classes of quantificational formulas", with Burton Dreben). He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he is now Walter Beverly Pearson Professor of Modern Mathematics and Mathematical Logic in the Department of Philosophy. He has been on the Harvard faculty since 1975, and was tenured in 1982, the only philosopher to be promoted to tenure at Harvard