G.H.R. Parkinson is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Reading. His numerous books include works on Spinoza, Leibniz, Wittgenstein, Lukács; he is also the General Editor of An Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Routledge, 1988).

• 1. The philosophy of the Italian Renaissance2. Renaissance philosophy outside Italy3. Science and mathematics from the Renaissance to Descartes4. Francis Bacon and man's two-faced kingdom5. Descares: methodology6. Descartes: metaphysics and philosophy of mind7. Seventeenth-century materialism: Gassendi and Hobbes8. Spinoza: metaphysics and knowledge9. The moral and political philosophy of Spinoza10. Occasionalism11. Leibniz: truth, knowledge and metaphysics