This book presents a rather unique and peculiar history of modern philosophy. A history that starts as an adventure of the era with the founding of Jamestown and the ensuing massacre, and ends as a dramatic Western with the displacement of the last free Indian tribes and the expansion of civilization across all the so-called frontier areas.

In between, many wondrous things happened in this vast country that seemed to be a true natural state inhabited by the real natural man, the Indian. All this caused a series of terrible upheavals in the entirety of European thought – from cosmology and theology to ethics and political philosophy.

The book examines the way in which the most important philosophers of modernity perceived, processed, and incorporated the Indian life into their systems. From the philosophers of British empiricism and Scottish Enlightenment, to the French Enlightenment thinkers and, of course, Rousseau, up to the major thinkers of the 19th century, Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and Marx, unfolds a history of modern philosophy featuring the wild and free Indian as its protagonist.