This course turns to the texts of several influential thinkers in modern philosophy in order to trace the development of some major themes in the Western intellectual tradition. Topics include: methodical doubt, Descartes’s cogito and proofs of God’s existence, man and society, empiricism and skepticism, the origin and association of ideas, noumena and phenomena, a priori concepts, materialism, communism, and pragmatism. Students who complete the course will be able to articulate several distinctive features of modern thought and points of continuity and discontinuity with the earlier (ancient and medieval) tradition.