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
20th-century French philosophy Feminism. Key thinkers include psychoanalytic and cultural theorist Luce Irigaray (born 1930), psychoanalyst and writer Julia Kristeva (born 1941), writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, writer and cultural theorist Helen Cixous and artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger. One suggested way of understanding French philosophy of this period, it has been suggested, is to locate the major influential figures in their current. The major influences were primarily 6 Germans from preceding eras - Hegel, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger. For example, Alexander Kojeve's Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit were quite a sensation in Paris in the 1930s. It was attended