Modern philosophy is construed as beginning sometime in the Renaissance. A philosophy that seeks new foundations for knowledge was offered as an alternative to that provided by the ancient philosophers. Modern philosophy was presented as starting afresh from new beginnings—turning to nature directly (Francis Bacon), turning to the mind directly (René Descartes), turning to experience directly (Thomas Hobbes). The "quarrel between the ancients and the moderns" resulted from this basic disagreement as to the sources of philosophical knowledge.

Modern philosophy turned away from the past and toward the future, toward the advancement of knowledge, toward human understanding, and toward progress through method or through experience. With the break between the Continental rationalists (Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Benedict de Spinoza) and the British empiricists (Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume) at the end of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a new formulation in...