The roll call of great early modern Western philosophers trips readily off any undergraduate's tongue: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley and Hume – the rationalists and the empiricists. Again and again, professional philosophers and students alike come back to these figures for instruction and inspiration. The main objective of this book is to set out clearly views on the philosophy of mind held by each of these six figures. Each thinker has a distinct stance on the nature of mind that can be found in his central text or texts. So I shall be mainly looking at Descartes's Meditations and Discourse on Method, Spinoza's Ethics, Leibniz's Monadology and Discourse on Metaphysics, Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous and Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (especially Book I).

Students of the history of philosophy will be well aware that most commentaries give some attention to the views on mind held by their subject. However, this discussion is usually restricted to a thinker's position on the metaphysics of mind. My intention here is to go beyond this and try to discover what each of the six philosophers has to say that is relevant to four topics that have been of strong interest to philosophers of mind in recent years. So, in each of the six parts to come, the discussion follows the same pattern.