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
International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy for founding a Journal for the philosophy of law on a neo-idealistic basis was from Fritz Berolzheimer, a lawyer and private scholar from Munich. This idea coincided with Kohler‘s distinctive interest in founding new academic enterprises. Both men knew each other from academic correspondence, which derived from the publishing of Berolzheimer‘s five-volume „System der Rechts- und Wirtschaftsphilosophie“ („A system of Philosophy of Law and Economic Philosophy“, 1904–1907/08). This opus dealt not only with Hegel, but also with Josef Kohler‘s philosophy intensively. In 1906, Berolzheimer even wrote an article on „J. Kohler as an philosopher of law“ („J. Kohler als Rechtsphilosoph“).