PriyankaA history of western philosophy 7
A profile of some 18th century philosophers follows:
Locke
Locke was one of the centuries major empiricists, although his major work concerned not knowledge, but politics. Here, he claimed that Hobbes was wrong in believing that people implicitly agreed to a social contract, and that therefore they had the right to rebel if a social contract was not consented to.
Many of his famous philosophies connected to this, including his labour theory of property, whereby someone came to own something by combining his labour with it.
While not an eighteenth century philosopher, he set the stage for much of what they had to say.
David Hume
Hume was an incredible philosopher and it would be impossible to describe all of his works. He was an empiricist, who famously demonstrated that free will is actually incompatible with indeterminism, by showing that if it does not originate from what has come before then it is just random.
Hegel
While their is some debate over his meaning, Hegel is most famous for the thesis, antithesis, synthesis argument. This is the belief that an idea (say capitalism), will give rise to an opposed idea (say, communism) and a synthesis, or combination of the two will result. This idea has had an extremely major affect on later philosophers.
Adam
