Enlightenment Invention of the Modern Self

17th-Century Secular Versions of the Self (1x3)

Air date: Jan 15, 2000

This lecture considers the implications of René Descartes' rationalism and of the empiricism of the British political theorist Thomas Hobbes. Enlightenment thinkers had to reconfigure empiricism to avoid its grimmer aspects—defining competition as constructive and sociability as natural for human beings.