page_title: Western canon
section_title: Seventeenth-century philosophers
hierarchical_section_title: Western canon / Canon of philosophers / Seventeenth-century philosophers
caption_attribution_description: Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes; engraving by Abraham Bosse English: The frontispiece of the book Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes; engraving by Abraham Bosse Français&#160;: Frontispice du Léviathan de Thomas Hobbes, gravure d'Abraham Bosse Español: Portada del libro Leviathan, por Abraham Bosse. La frase latina que aparece en la parte superior ("Non est potestas super terram quae comparetur ei", que se puede traducir como "No hay poder sobre la Tierra que se le compare") es una cita del Libro de Job Deutsch: Titelblatt von Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Zu sehen ist der Souverän, der über Land, Städte und deren Bewohner herrscht. Sein Körper besteht aus den Menschen, die in den Gesellschaftsvertrag eingewilligt haben. In seinen Händen hält er Schwert und Hirtenstab, die Zeichen für weltliche und geistliche Macht. Überschrieben ist die Abbildung durch ein Zitat aus dem Buch Hiob: „keine Macht auf Erden ist mit der seinen vergleichbar“.&#91;1&#93;
context_page_description: The Western canon is the body of high culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that is highly valued in the West: works that have achieved the status of classics. However, not all these works originate in the Western world, and such works are also valued throughout the world. It is "a certain Western intellectual tradition that goes from, say, Socrates to Wittgenstein in philosophy, and from Homer to James Joyce in literature". The word canon is derived from ancient Greek κανών, kanṓn, meaning a measuring rod, or standard. The Bible, a product of ancient Jewish culture, from the Levant, in Western Asia, has been a major force in shaping Western culture, and "has inspired some of the great monuments of human thought, literature, and art".
  The canon of books has been fairly stable, although it has very recently expanded to include more women and racial minorities, while the canons of music and the visual arts have greatly expanded to cover the Middle Ages, and subsequent centuries once largely overlooked. But some examples of newer media such as cinema have attained a precarious position in the canon.
context_section_description: The seventeenth century was important for philosophy, and the major figures were Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), René Descartes (1596–1650), Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), John Locke (1632–1704) and  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).
caption: Frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan
exif: {"Image Copyright": "Public Domain, from the British Library's collections, 2013"}