Early Modern Philosophy
Secondary Sources

Here are some entry points into the secondary literature on these topics.  These can provide starting points for your literature reviews. However, they are starting points only! Many of the books I mention are now twenty or thirty (or more!) years old; they are still valuable, but you should also look into the more recent literature.

General Sources

The Philosopher's Index: There is one absolutely essential index to the periodical literature in philosophy, namely The Philosopher's Index. You can access it from the library's web site: http://lib.trinity.edu/dbs/dbs.asp#P. (There's a hard copy version too, but I'm not sure why anyone would use it now that the electronic version is available.) Searching is easy and on most topics will return a lot of material -- weed through it carefully, as some of it will be good and a lot will be so-so! If we have full-text access you can access articles directly from the index (but there seems to be a "full text" link regardless of whether we actually have full-text access or not, so often you'll follow the link only to be disappointed).

Journals:  Many excellent philosophy journals include articles on early modern philosophy. One journal worth a special mention is The Philosophical Review. (See the discussion of JSTOR and Poiesis under "Internet Resources" below.) This is a superb philosophy journal with highly competent, well-written, well-edited pieces.  Other journals likely to be particularly useful are History of Philosophy Quarterly and The Journal of the History of Philosophy. Sometimes The Journal of the History of Ideas also has interesting material. Many other philosophy journals also include articles on historical topics; among the better ones are the Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Mind, Nous, and Philosophical Studies.

Encyclopedias:  The classic source is The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Macmillan, 1967; second edition, 2006), which has substantial articles on all the figures covered in our course.  We have full-text access to the second edition via the library. You can find the link at http://lib.trinity.edu/dbs/dbs.asp#E. Another useful encyclopedia is The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The library has this in hard copy and also a CD-ROM version accessible in the library. We do not currently have access to the online version. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a free, online, and very valuable resource with substantial articles on all the figures covered in our class. It frequently has multiple articles on a single philosopher -- there are currently thirteen articles on Kant alone!

Online access to journal articles: At Trinity we have on-line full-text access to articles from the Philosophical Review as well as The Journal of Philosophy, Mind, and many other first-rate journals through JSTOR. There is a five-year embargo on articles, though, so for recent articles you need to look elsewhere. Another online index with full-text access to philosophical journals, including The Philosophical Review, Hume Studies, The Leibniz Review, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, is Poiesis. This source has only a one-year embargo, but unlike JSTOR, the articles are HTML versions rather than PDF reproductions of the actual journal pages, which I find frustrating. (There appears to be a new beta version of Poiesis, called Philosophy Online, that has PDF files of articles. Personally, I prefer this.)

A Few Sources on Specific Philosophers

These are a little hit-or-miss:  things I happen to have or have run across. I haven't listed anything that doesn't look useful to me, but there's bound to be an awful lot of good material I haven't listed. 

Descartes:

Cottingham, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Descartes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Overview articles on many important issues, including the Cogito, the Cartesian circle, the proofs of God's existence, etc.

Doney, Willis, ed. Descartes: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1968.

Gaukroger, Stephen. Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. There's lots of philosophical stuff mixed in with the history here. And where else could you learn, for example, that Descartes' body was exhumed in Stockholm in 1666 to be moved to France, at which time his right forefinger was cut off by the French ambassador?

Hooker, Michael, ed. Descartes: Critical and Interpretive Essays. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Kenny, Anthony. Descartes: A Study of his Philosophy. New York: Random House, 1968.

Williams, Bernard. Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. Hard going in places, but well-written and fascinating.

Wilson, Margaret Dauler. Descartes. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Quite difficult, but a goldmine of helpful quotations from a wide range of Descartes’s writings.

Spinoza:

Bennett, Jonathan. A Study of Spinoza's Ethics. Hackett, 1984. Relentlessly argumentative and extremely useful.

Garrett, Don. The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Good overviews of many areas of Spinoza's thought, including an essay on his metaphysics by Jonathan Bennett and one on his philosophy of mind by Michael Della Rocca.

Grene, Marjorie, ed. Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1973.

Hampshire, Stuart. Spinoza. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951. Classic exposition of Spinoza’s philosophy for a general audience.

Kashap, S. Paul, ed. Studies in Spinoza: Critical and Interpretive Essays. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972.

Mandelbaum, Maurice, and Eugene Freeman, eds. Spinoza: Essays in Interpretation. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1975.

Wolfson, Harry Austryn. The Philosophy of Spinoza. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934. (Two volumes.) Spinoza in relation to medieval thought. There's a one-volume paperback reprint you can occasionally find in used bookstores.

Leibniz:

Frankfurt, Harry G., ed. Leibniz: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1972. True, it's nearly forty years old now, but contains a lot of classic and still useful essays.

Rescher, Nicholas. Leibniz: An Introduction to his Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell, 1979. Clearly written overview.

Locke:

Mackie, J. L. Problems from Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Not a commentary on Locke but an investigation of a number of the issues he raised.

Martin, C. B., and D. M. Armstrong, eds. Locke and Berkeley: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1968.

Newman, Lex, ed. The  Cambridge Companion to Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Good overview articles on many important topics in the Essay, including the primary-secondary quality distinction, power, substance, etc.

Tipton, I. C., ed. Locke on Human Understanding: Selected Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Hume:

Smith, Norman Kemp. The Philosophy of David Hume. London: Macmillan [1941] 1964. A classic.

Stroud, Barry. Hume. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977. A good discussion of all of Hume’s philosophy.

Kant:

Gardner, Sebastian. Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason. London: Routledge, 1999. Comprehensive overview with discussion of recent scholarship. Includes a useful bibliographical essay.

Guyer, Paul, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Good overviews of many topics in Kant's philosophy, including space and time, substance and causation, and many more. An especially useful volume for our class, because contributors were asked to discuss Kant in relation to other early modern figures.

Smith, Norman Kemp. A Commentary to Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason.” Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, [1923] 1962. Detailed commentary; can be extremely helpful.

Wolff, Robert Paul, ed. Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1967.

Ewing, A. C. A Short Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938. Exactly what the title says. 

Wolff, Robert Paul. Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity. A detailed, often paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on some of the hardest parts of the Critique of Pure Reason, notably the “Transcendental Deduction.”