David Hume was a Scottish philosopher in the eighteenth century. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential philosophers in British history and one of the pioneers of empiricism and skepticism in Britain. His most famous work A Treatise of Human Nature attempts to empirically examine the psychological basis of human behavior. Hume firmly believed that people could not have innate ideas, but could only have an understanding based on the things they had directly experienced.  

Francis Bacon was an English scientist who is often credited with coming up with what is now known as "the scientific method." Bacon believed that scientific inquiry was too often conducted with the incorrect spirit, or with the wrong intentions. He advocated for inductive reasoning that prioritized observation and the collection of data above the sporadic and unsupported development of theories based on tradition that had previously dominated scientific inquiry. The general principle of inductive reasoning is to build one's larger theories about phenomena on an accumulated base of smaller, quantifiable observations.

The primary emphasis of most writers of the Renaissance, particularly those who ascribed to humanism, was to consider and celebrate the human experience. Humanist writers celebrated the possibility of all people to better their world and focused much less on religious considerations then had their counterparts in the Medieval Era. This is not to say that Renaissance humanists were all atheists; many were deeply religious. They simply sought to turn their intellectual pursuits toward more open and nuanced treatments of human endeavor and experience.

Secularism emerged as a political and social philosophy in the Renaissance period of European history and grew in influence during the Enlightenment and Industrial eras. It advocates primarily for the separation of the political and the religious (for example, no laws based on religious codes, etc.). It also contends that life on Earth is "more important" than the afterlife and that all religious beliefs should be tolerated, although these tenets of secularism were added by degrees as the centuries went by.

Humanism arose in the early part of the Renaissance period. It was based on the study of classical writings, and the early humanists revered the Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Plato. Humanism emphasized the inherent ability of people to reason, to think critically, and to examine phenomena via evidence.

Another name for methodic doubt is Cartesian doubt. Rene Descartes was among the most influential philosophers of the 17th century, as evidenced by the use of a variation on his name as a, not uncommon, adjective.

Copernicus wrote On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in the sixteenth century, and this work was published after his death. This work described a heliocentric model of the universe, in which the sun was posited as the center of the universe, with the planets revolving around it. Copernicus's model implicitly disputed the accuracy of the prevailing scientific model, the Ptolemaic or geocentric model, in which the earth was the center of the universe. Also, note that Copernicus's model did not recognize that planetary motion was elliptical.

Sir Francis Bacon was an English scientist in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries who pioneered the scientific method and greatly emphasized the importance of inductive reasoning as opposed to deductive reasoning. His development of the scientific method is one of the most important steps of the Scientific Revolution and contributed to the massive growth in human understanding of chemistry and physics in the centuries that followed. In the scientific method, the first step is to gather facts and then to conduct unbiased experiments designed to test a certain theory; this differed greatly from the earlier approach of running experiments and then postulating a theory to match the outcome of the test.

Throughout the Scientific Revolution, the Papacy was extremely hostile to any developments that challenged the church’s established doctrine on creation and the nature of the universe. This was particularly true of any revelations to do with astronomy, to the point where Copernicus waited until after his death to have his work on the heliocentric model of the solar system published, and Galileo lived in constant fear of punishment and execution.

In 1600, William Gilbert published his groundbreaking work on magnetism, specifically in regard to the magnetic nature of the Earth’s atmosphere. This made navigation and the use of compasses far easier and more reliable and allowed European explorers and traders to push further afield and to have much greater faith in the security of their journeys.