PHH3400 Modern Philosophy is the study of the period in which Western philosophy broke with the medieval synthesis and rebuilt its foundations from the ground up — roughly the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from Descartes to Kant.
The course is offered at approximately five Florida institutions, including Florida Atlantic University, Florida State University, the University of Florida, the University of North Florida and the University of West Florida.
The University of West Florida places it in the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Department of History and Philosophy at 3 semester hours, and describes the development of modern philosophy from the Renaissance through the 18th century, naming Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant. It meets the College-Level Communication Skills Requirement. Florida State University describes it as a critical study of the theories of 17th- and 18th-century Western philosophers through a careful examination of representative texts from both the empiricist and rationalist traditions.
The two descriptions agree closely, and that agreement is worth noting, because it is unusual. Many upper-division philosophy courses vary substantially between institutions. This one does not: the canon is settled, the chronological boundaries are settled, and the organising structure — rationalists and empiricists, resolved (or dissolved) by Kant — is the standard way the period has been taught for over a century. A student who takes this course at one Florida institution has taken essentially the same course as a student at another.
What makes the period "modern" is not its date but its starting point. Medieval philosophy largely began from authority — scripture, Aristotle, the accumulated commentary — and reasoned within it. The modern period begins by asking what a person can know on their own, without borrowing anyone's authority, and then tries to rebuild everything else on whatever survives that test. Descartes' method of doubt is the emblematic move: strip away every belief that can possibly be doubted and see what is left standing.
The consequences of that move are what the course actually tracks. Once knowledge has to be justified from the individual's own resources, three questions become urgent and stay urgent for two hundred years: what can the mind know, what is the mind's relation to the body, and what exists independently of being perceived. The rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) answer largely by appeal to reason and innate structure; the empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) answer largely by appeal to experience; and each tradition, pressed hard enough, arrives somewhere its founders did not intend.
The trajectory toward Hume is the intellectual spine of the course. Locke's empiricism looks like common sense. Berkeley shows that if you take it seriously, material substance drops out — to be is to be perceived. Hume takes it further still and finds that causation, the self, and inductive reasoning itself cannot be justified on empiricist grounds. This is not a historical curiosity. It is a genuine, unresolved problem, and the fact that a careful and modest starting point leads to a radically skeptical conclusion is the single most philosophically interesting thing most students encounter in an undergraduate degree.
Kant is the destination. His response — that the mind imposes structure on experience rather than merely receiving it, so certain features of the world are knowable in advance precisely because they are conditions of experiencing anything at all — reframes the entire debate rather than picking a side in it. Whether the course reaches Kant, and how much time it spends there, is the main variation between institutions.
Position in the philosophy major. This course is normally one half of a required two-course history sequence, paired with ancient philosophy (PHH3100). Some programmes add nineteenth-century (PHH3500) or medieval (PHH4200) philosophy as electives, and UWF carries both. The history requirement exists because contemporary philosophical problems are largely inherited ones, and reading a current paper on personal identity or causation without knowing what Locke and Hume said about it is like joining a conversation two centuries late.
Philosophy is not vocational, and this guide will not pretend otherwise. What it is, reliably, is training in reading difficult material accurately and writing arguments that hold up — and the destinations below reflect that rather than any direct content match.
UWF and FSU describe this course in nearly the same terms, and the statewide title is Modern Philosophy at all five institutions that carry it. The canon (Descartes through Kant), the period (17th–18th century), and the organising structure (rationalism versus empiricism) are stable. This is one of the more reliably transferable upper-division humanities courses in the state.
The variation that does exist is in depth versus breadth: some sections read four philosophers closely, others survey eight or nine. Both are defensible. A close-reading section will not have covered Leibniz; a survey section will not have read the Meditations entire. Neither gap matters for articulation.
This is the main substantive variation. UWF's description ends at Kant and includes him; some institutions stop at Hume and treat Kant in a separate course. If you are planning graduate study in philosophy, make sure you get Kant somewhere — a philosophy student who has not read the first Critique in some form has a conspicuous gap, and it is the hardest text in the undergraduate curriculum to pick up alone.
UWF lists no prerequisite, which is typical. Most institutions either list none or recommend an introductory philosophy course.
⚠ "No prerequisite" is not the same as "no useful preparation." An introductory philosophy course (PHI2010) is genuinely helpful, because it introduces the vocabulary and the practice of reading philosophically, and this course assumes both. A student arriving without it is doing two things at once. Logic (PHI3130) is the other useful companion, since much of the course is argument reconstruction and the ability to put an argument into standard form makes the primary texts markedly easier.
The course normally sits in the junior year, after the introductory and logic courses and before the senior seminar. It is a required history course in most Florida philosophy majors and a common elective for English, history, political science and religious studies students.
3 credits, 45 contact hours — a standard lecture-discussion course meeting three hours per week.
⚠ The reading load is the workload, and it is deceptive. The page counts are modest — thirty pages a week is a heavy assignment in this course — but the pages are dense, translated, and written in an idiom three centuries old. Thirty pages of Hume takes longer than a hundred pages of most textbooks, and reading it once is rarely enough. Budget 6–9 hours per week, and expect the time to go into re-reading rather than volume.
Assessment is typically two or three essays plus examinations, sometimes a presentation. The essays are the course. They are graded on whether the argument works, not on whether the position is agreeable, and students coming from courses graded on content coverage frequently misjudge this on the first attempt.
Students who struggle in this course almost always struggle for the same reason: they read the primary texts the way they read a textbook, looking for information to retain. That does not work here, because the texts are arguments, not reports.
PHH3400 is a 3000-level course and articulates through the Statewide Course Numbering System under the same number at the five institutions that carry it. Because the content is stable, transfer disputes are rare.
⚠ Upper-division, so it is not a state-college course. A student completing an A.A. at a Florida College System institution will not have taken this; it is taken after transfer. Plan the philosophy major's history sequence for the junior and senior years accordingly.
⚠ Do not confuse the history sequence numbers. PHH3100 is ancient philosophy, PHH3400 modern, PHH3500 nineteenth-century, PHH4200 medieval, PHH4600 contemporary. The PHH prefix is history of philosophy; the PHI prefix is philosophy by topic. Programmes typically require one or two from the PHH family and several from PHI. They are not interchangeable, and a substitution request that treats a PHI course as satisfying a PHH requirement is normally refused.
UWF records that this course meets the College-Level Communication Skills Requirement — a Florida requirement satisfied by courses with a substantial writing component. That designation is institution-specific: it does not automatically travel with the course to another institution, so a transferring student should confirm how the receiving institution treats it rather than assuming the writing designation transfers with the credit.
AI tools are relevant to this course in a way that is worth stating precisely, because the honest answer is neither "useful, go ahead" nor "prohibited".
Where they help. Large language models are genuinely good at paraphrasing a difficult seventeenth-century sentence into modern English, at supplying historical context, and at answering "what does Locke mean by 'idea' here?" in a way that gets a stuck student moving again. Used that way, an AI assistant does roughly what a patient teaching assistant does, and there is no principled objection to it.
Where they fail, specifically. Models reproduce the textbook consensus about each philosopher — the version that appears in a hundred summaries — and they reproduce it confidently whether or not it is what the assigned passage says. They are notably weak at close reading of a specific text, they fabricate quotations and page references, and they smooth over exactly the interpretive difficulties that a good essay is supposed to engage. An essay built from a model's summary reads like every other essay built from a model's summary, and graders in this field recognise it immediately, because the flattening is distinctive.
The deeper problem is that the difficulty is the point. The reason to spend three weeks on the Meditations is not to end up knowing what Descartes concluded — that fits in a sentence. It is to develop the capacity to follow an unfamiliar argument, hold it in mind, and find where it is weak. Outsourcing the struggle removes the only thing the course was offering. This is not a moral claim; it is a claim about what you will and will not be able to do afterwards.
Academic integrity. Policies vary by institution and increasingly by instructor. Read the syllabus, and ask if it is unclear. Presenting model-generated prose as your own is plagiarism under every Florida institution's policy; using a model to check your own reconstruction of an argument may be entirely permitted. The distinction is usually between tools that help you think and tools that think instead of you, and instructors in philosophy tend to draw it more sharply than in most disciplines because the discipline's whole product is reasoning.
One genuinely good use worth trying: having a model argue against a position you have written. Objection-and-reply is a required part of a philosophy essay and the hardest part to do well, because it requires taking your own view seriously enough to attack it. A model will generate the standard objections quickly. You still have to decide which are serious and answer them yourself — but it beats staring at the page.
Generated September 7, 2026 · Updated September 7, 2026