This course begins with the birth of modern philosophy in the face of the Scientific Revolution.  How is modern science possible?  How can we know that the claims made by modern science, visible in the advanced technology that is ubiquitous in our daily lives, are true?  This is the question that motivates the first modern philosopher, Descartes, who stands as the turning point from medieval to modern thought, and the question that motivates subsequent modern philosophers.  In response to this question, modern philosophy encompasses the effort to locate the foundation of all knowledge in the cogito; the dualism of thinking and extended things; attempts to prove the existence of God; the portrayal in the state of nature of the encounter with the other as a threat, or the war of each against all; the renewed problem of material ontology or the identity and constitution of physical things; debates on the origins of knowledge between rationalism and empiricism; the skeptical challenge to the very possibility of knowledge; the recognition of the human condition as a heartfelt experience stretched between infinity and nothingness; the reply to skepticism in transcendental idealism that seeks to establish scientific knowledge through the a priori conditions for the possibility of experience, alongside a critique of the limits of knowledge; the race to complete the critical project and reunify the self divided between freedom and nature, spontaneity and receptivity, in German Idealism; and the affirmation of life paradoxically located in the death of God.  Authors read will include Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Pascal, Kant, Schelling, Jacobi, and Nietzsche.  Students who complete the course will be able to articulate the key movements, questions, and themes of modern philosophy as well as points of continuity and discontinuity with earlier ancient and medieval thought.