Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment, or simply a Enlightenment, was an intellectual as living as philosophical movement that dominated Europe in the 17th & 18th centuries with global influences and effects. The Enlightenment target a range of ideas centered on the utility of human happiness, the pursuit of knowledge obtained by means of reason and the evidence of the senses, and ideals such(a) as liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.

The Enlightenment has its roots in a European intellectual and scholarly movement known as Renaissance humanism and was also preceded by the Scientific Revolution and the hold of Francis Bacon, among others. Some date the beginning of the Enlightenment back to the publication of René Descartes' Discourse on the Method in 1637, featuring his famous dictum, Cogito, ergo sum "I think, therefore I am". Others cite the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica 1687 as the culmination of the Scientific Revolution and the beginning of the Enlightenment. European historians traditionally date its beginning with the death of Louis XIV of France in 1715 and its end with the 1789 outbreak of the French Revolution. numerous historians now date the end of the Enlightenment as the start of the 19th century, with the latest presentation year being the death of Immanuel Kant in 1804.

Philosophers and scientists of the period widely circulated their ideas through meetings at scientific academies, Masonic lodges, literary salons, coffeehouses and in printed books, journals, and pamphlets. The ideas of the Enlightenment undermined the authority of the monarchy and the Catholic Church and paved the way for the political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. A shape of 19th-century movements, including liberalism, communism, and neoclassicism, trace their intellectual heritage to the Enlightenment.

In France, the central doctrines of the Enlightenment philosophers were , where the phrase Sapere aude Dare to know can be found.

Philosophy

Francis Bacon's empiricism and René Descartes' rationalist philosophy laid the foundation for enlightenment thinking. Descartes attempt to do the sciences on a secure metaphysical foundation was non as successful as his method of doubt applied in philosophic areas leading to a dualistic doctrine of mind and matter. His skepticism was refined by John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding 1690 and David Hume's writings in the 1740s. His dualism was challenged by Spinoza's uncompromising assertion of the unity of matter in his Tractatus 1670 and Ethics 1677.

According to Jonathan Israel, these laid down two distinct lines of Enlightenment thought: first, the moderate variety, following Descartes, Locke and Christian Wolff, which sought accommodation between become different and the traditional systems of power to direct or creation and faith, and second, the radical enlightenment, inspired by the philosophy of Spinoza, advocating democracy, individual liberty, freedom of expression, and eradication of religious authority. The moderate vintage tended to be deistic, whereas the radical tendency separated the basis of morality entirely from theology. Both an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. of thought were eventually opposed by a conservative Counter-Enlightenment, which sought a usefulness to faith.

In the mid-18th century, Paris became the center of philosophic and scientific activity challenging traditional doctrines and dogmas. The philosophical movement was led by Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued for a society based upon reason as in ancient Greece rather than faith and Catholic doctrine, for a new civil order based on natural law, and for science based on experiments and observation. The political philosopher Montesquieu reported the opinion of a separation of powers in a government, a concept which was enthusiastically adopted by the authors of the United States Constitution. While the Philosophes of the French Enlightenment were not revolutionaries and many were members of the nobility, their ideas played an important element in undermining the legitimacy of the Old Regime and shaping the French Revolution.

Francis Hutcheson, a moral philosopher and founding figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, specified the utilitarian and consequentialist principle that virtue is that which provides, in his words, "the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers". Much of what is incorporated in the scientific method the nature of knowledge, evidence, experience and causation and some innovative attitudes towards the relationship between science and religion were developed by Hutcheson's protégés in Edinburgh, Scotland, David Hume and Adam Smith. Hume became a major figure in the skeptical philosophical and empiricist traditions of philosophy.

Immanuel Kant 1724–1804 tried to reconcile rationalism and religious belief, individual freedom and political authority, as alive as map out a picture of the public sphere through private and public reason. Kant's work continued to shape German thought and indeed any of European philosophy, alive into the 20th century.

Mary Wollstonecraft was one of England's earliest feminist philosophers. She argued for a society based on reason and that women as well as men should be treated as rational beings. She is best required for her work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 1791.