Modern and Contemporary Philosophy Study Guide: 132 Flashcards from Aquinas to Rawls

Philosophy exams rarely ask you to explain one thinker in isolation. They ask you to place Hume against Descartes, to explain why Kant answers both, and to say which twentieth-century camp Wittgenstein belongs to. The Modern & Contemporary Philosophy deck (code QD1505 on Flip It) is built for exactly that: 132 flashcards that run from Augustine and Aquinas through Descartes, Kant and Nietzsche to the analytic–continental divide and experimental philosophy.

The map hidden in 132 cards

The deck is really five decks in sequence, and it pays to study it that way:

1. Medieval bridge (14 cards): Augustine, Boethius and The Consolation of Philosophy, scholasticism, Anselm's ontological argument, Abelard, Aquinas and the Five Ways, Ockham's Razor, Duns Scotus, Averroes, Avicenna, Maimonides.
2. Early modern (about 25 cards): Renaissance humanism, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes and cogito ergo sum, Cartesian dualism, the rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz), the empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume), Hobbes' state of nature, Rousseau's social contract.
3. Kant and the nineteenth century: the categorical imperative, Kant's Copernican Revolution, German Idealism, Hegel's dialectic, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx's historical materialism, Nietzsche's "God is dead" and the Übermensch, Bentham and Mill's utilitarianism.
4. Twentieth-century movements: existentialism (Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus), phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), pragmatism (Peirce, James, Dewey), analytic philosophy (Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein), logical positivism (Ayer), Popper's falsificationism, Kuhn's paradigm shifts, Rawls' veil of ignorance.
5. Contemporary philosophy as a profession: professionalization, Hegel as the first state-appointed professor (1817), the founding dates of The Monist (1890), The Philosophical Review (1892) and the APA (1900), the four characteristics of continental philosophy, deconstruction, structuralism and post-structuralism, critical theory and the Frankfurt School, hermeneutics, speculative realism, experimental philosophy.

Sample flashcards

Two ways to make the names stick

Study thinkers as pairs of opposites. Almost every philosopher in the deck has a counterpart: Descartes' innate ideas against Locke's tabula rasa, Hobbes' brutish state of nature against Rousseau's natural goodness, Bentham's greatest happiness against Kant's universal maxim, Wittgenstein's early picture theory against his later language games, Popper's falsification against Kuhn's paradigms. When a card shows one name, say the rival's answer too. You will remember both positions faster than either alone, and the contrast is what essay questions reward.

Anchor the dates with the "common tradition up to Kant" card. The deck states that analytic and continental philosophy share one tradition until Kant (1724-1804). Use his lifetime as the hinge: everything born before it (Spinoza 1632, Locke 1632, Hume 1711) belongs to the rationalism–empiricism argument; everything after (Hegel 1770, Kierkegaard 1813, Nietzsche 1844, Frege 1848) is a reaction to him. Sorting each card into "before Kant" or "after Kant" turns 30 birth years into two groups.

Work through the five blocks in order, one per session, then let spaced repetition shuffle all 132 cards; the professionalization dates decay fastest, so expect them to resurface. Sign in to Flip It, search for deck QD1505 "Modern & Contemporary Philosophy", and begin with the rationalists and empiricists, the axis around which the whole deck turns.