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
Romanian philosophy such as Ciprian Mihali and Bogdan Ghiu. Although Mihali is more interested in the phenomenological analysis of the quotidian, his thinking is deeply rooted in French post-Structuralism. Ghiu, through his translations on Deleuze and various essays spread the influence of postmodern and poststructuralist French philosophy in Romania, although it remains rather subdued, without any mature philosophers. Analytic philosophy has developed mostly at the University of Bucharest, by such names as Mircea Dumitru, Adrian-Paul Iliescu, Adrian Miroiu, Valentin Mureşan, Mihail-Radu Solcan. Mircea Dumitru wrote on philosophical logic, the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. Iliescu is a political philosopher