Early Modern

The early modern period shattered medieval certainties and built new ones in their place. Copernicus displaced Earth from the centre of the cosmos; Galileo and Newton showed that nature obeys mathematical laws. Philosophers responded by asking what we can know and how. Descartes sought an indubitable foundation for knowledge and found the thinking self. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume traced knowledge back to experience. Spinoza and Leibniz constructed grand rationalist systems. Out of this ferment came the Enlightenment — the conviction that reason alone could reform politics, religion, and human life.