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
Theosophy and Western philosophy Theosophy and Western philosophy Modern Theosophy is classified by prominent representatives of Western philosophy as a "pantheistic philosophical-religious system." A Russian philosopher Vladimir Trefilov claimed that Blavatsky's doctrine was formed from the beginning as a synthesis of philosophical views and religious forms of the various ages and peoples with modern scientific ideas. An author of The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Michael Wakoff stated that Blavatskian Theosophy was based on Buddhist and Hindu philosophy, and fragments of the Western esotericism with using an "absolutist metaphysics." In "" it is said Blavatsky's Theosophy is an attempt to merge into a universal doctrine