How can philosophical modernity, articulated by a historical category designating the 17th and 18th centuries and a philosophical and scientific break with aristothecian achievements, be embodied, for example, by philosophers as different as Bacon and Descartes? It is often reconstituted in a fictional manner in the terms of a research programme to ensure that humans take control of nature by technology, drawn up by each of those authors. The much more complex nature of its real origin is made intelligible here by a dialectic approach, which makes it possible to reconstruct the intellectual fabric between the two thinkers and to examine how their respective concepts are agreed and opposed. The contributions presented in the volume thus show that the history of modern philosophy is structured by two lines of thought articulated and influencing each other, rationalism and empirism.