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
French philosophy with the advent of structuralism, which came to be seen as merely a necessary means of access to post-structuralism, while postmodern thought came to dominate the late 20th century. Philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ultimate purpose of science. In France, philosophy of science (also known as French historical epistemology or French epistemology) was a prominent school of thought with Poincaré, Bachelard, Cavaillès and Vuillemin. Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) had philosophical views