Scotism, or the doctrine of Voluntarism was promoted by Joannes Duns Scotus, a Franciscan scholor who emphasized the power and efficacy of the individual will.

 

Francis Bacon added a system of reasoning (whereby facts are arrived at by a process of observation and verified by experimentation) that cleared the way for the schools of modern science.

 

Bacon was followed by Thomas Hobbes who held mathematics to he the only exact science and thought to be essentially a mathematical process.

 

Hobbes laid special stress upon the significance of words, declaring understanding to be the faculty of perceiving the relationship between words and the objects (or numbers) for which they stand.

 

Scotus, Bacon and Hobbes established Post-Reformation, or modern, philosophies:

 

Humanism, Rationalism, Political Philosophy, Empiricism, Moralism, Idealism, Realism, Phenomenalism Behaviourism and Neo-Realism.