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Age of Enlightenment

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Philosophy

   The Age of Enlightenment refers to either the eighteenth century in
   European philosophy, or the longer period including the seventeenth
   century and the Age of Reason. It can more narrowly refer to the
   historical intellectual movement The Enlightenment, which advocated
   Reason as a means to establishing an authoritative system of
   aesthetics, ethics, government, and logic, which would allow human
   beings to obtain objective truth about the universe. Emboldened by the
   revolution in physics commenced by Newtonian kinematics, Enlightenment
   thinkers argued that same kind of systematic thinking could apply to
   all forms of human activity.

   The intellectual leaders regarded themselves as a courageous elite who
   would lead the world into progress from a long period of doubtful
   tradition, irrationality, superstition, and tyranny, which they imputed
   to the Dark Ages. The movement helped create the intellectual framework
   for the American and French Revolutions, the Latin American
   independence movement, and the Polish Constitution of May 3; and led to
   the rise of classical liberalism and capitalism. It is matched with the
   high baroque and classical eras in music, and the neo-classical period
   in the arts; it receives contemporary attention as being one of the
   central models for many movements in the modern period.

   The enlightenment was mirrored by the Jewish Haskalah, which in Western
   Europe and particularly in Germany resulted in the elevation and
   eventual replacement of Yiddish by Hebrew, as well as the Jewish reform
   and Zionist Nationalist movements.

History of Enlightenment philosophy

   Another important movement in 18th century philosophy, closely related
   to it, focused on belief and piety. Some of its proponents, such as
   George Berkeley, attempted to demonstrate rationally the existence of a
   supreme being. Piety and belief in this period were integral to the
   exploration of natural philosophy and ethics, in addition to political
   theories of the age. However, prominent Enlightenment philosophers such
   as Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and David Hume
   questioned and attacked the existing institutions of both Church and
   State.

   The 19th century also saw a continued rise of empirical philosophical
   ideas and their application to political economy, government and
   sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology.

   The Enlightenment (if thought of as a short period) was preceded by the
   Age of Reason or (if thought of as a long period) by the Renaissance
   and the Reformation. It was followed by Romanticism.
   William Blake's Newton as a divine geometer (1795)
   Enlarge
   William Blake's Newton as a divine geometer (1795)

   The boundaries of the Enlightenment cover much of the seventeenth
   century as well, though others term the previous era " The Age of
   Reason." For the present purposes, these two eras are split; however,
   it is equally acceptable to think of them conjoined as one long period.

   Europe had been ravaged by religious wars; when peace in the political
   situation had been restored, after the Peace of Westphalia and the
   English Civil War, an intellectual upheaval overturned the accepted
   belief that mysticism and revelation are the primary sources of
   knowledge and wisdom—which was blamed for fomenting political
   instability. Instead, (according to those that split the two periods),
   the Age of Reason sought to establish axiomatic philosophy and
   absolutism as foundations for knowledge and stability. Epistemology, in
   the writings of Michel de Montaigne and René Descartes, was based on
   extreme skepticism and inquiry into the nature of "knowledge." The goal
   of a philosophy based on self-evident axioms reached its height with
   Baruch (Benedictus de) Spinoza's Ethics, which expounded a pantheistic
   view of the universe where God and Nature were one. This idea then
   became central to the Enlightenment from Newton through to Jefferson.
   The ideas of Pascal, Leibniz, Galileo and other philosophers of the
   previous period also contributed to and greatly influenced the
   Enlightenment; for instance, according to E. Cassirer, Leibniz’s
   treatise On Wisdom ". . . identified the central concept of the
   Enlightenment and sketched its theoretical programme" (Cassirer 1979:
   121–123). There was a wave of change across European thinking,
   exemplified by Newton's natural philosophy, which combined mathematics
   of axiomatic proof with mechanics of physical observation, a coherent
   system of verifiable predictions, which set the tone for what followed
   Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in the century
   after.

   The Age of Enlightenment is also prominent in the history of Judaism,
   perhaps because of its conjunction with increased social acceptance of
   Jews in some western European states, especially those who were not
   orthodox or who converted to the officially sanctioned version of
   Christianity.

Key conflicts within Enlightenment-period philosophy

   As with theology, philosophy became a source of partisan debate, with
   different schools attempting to develop rationales for their
   viewpoints, which then, in turn, became generally accepted. Thus
   philosophers such as Spinoza searched for a metaphysics of ethics. This
   trend later influenced pietism and eventually transcendental searches
   such as those by Immanuel Kant.

   Religion was linked to another concept which inspired a great amount of
   Enlightenment thought, namely the rise of the Nation-state. In medieval
   and Renaissance periods, the state was restricted by the need to work
   through a host of intermediaries. This system existed because of poor
   communication, where localism thrived in return for loyalty to some
   central organization. With the improvements in transportation,
   organization, navigation and finally the influx of gold and silver from
   trade and conquest, however, the state assumed more and more authority
   and power. Intellectuals responded with a series of theories on the
   purpose of, and limits of state power. Therefore, during The
   Enlightenment absolutism was cemented and a string of philosophers
   reacted by advocating limitation, from John Locke forward, who
   influenced both Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Enlightenment ideas
   influenced organisations seeking to effect state and social
   development, such as the Freemasons and Illuminati. And they ultimately
   had a profound effect on the actions of politically active individuals
   worldwide.

   Within the period of the Enlightenment, these issues began to be
   explored in the question of what constituted the proper relationship of
   the citizen to the monarch or the state. The idea that society is a
   contract between individual and some larger entity, whether society or
   state, continued to grow throughout this period. A series of
   philosophers, including Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hume and Jefferson
   advocated this idea. Furthermore, thinkers of this age advocated the
   idea that nationality had a basis beyond mere preference. Philosophers
   such as Johann Gottfried von Herder reasserted the idea from Greek
   antiquity that language had a decisive influence on cognition and
   thought, and that the meaning of a particular book or text was open to
   deeper exploration based on deeper connections, an idea now called
   hermeneutics. The original focus of his scholarship was to delve into
   the meaning in the Bible and in order to gain a deeper understanding of
   it. These two concepts - of the contractual nature between the state
   and the citizen, and the reality of the nation beyond that contract,
   had a decisive influence in the development of liberalism, democracy
   and constitutional government which followed.

   At the same time, the integration of algebraic thinking, acquired from
   the Islamic world over the previous two centuries, and geometric
   thinking which had dominated Western mathematics and philosophy since
   at least Eudoxus, precipitated a scientific and mathematical
   revolution. Sir Isaac Newton's greatest claim to prominence came from a
   systematic application of algebra to geometry, and synthesizing a
   workable calculus which was applicable to scientific problems. The
   Enlightenment was a time when the solar system was truly discovered:
   with the accurate calculation of orbits, such as Halley's comet, the
   discovery of the first planet since antiquity, Uranus by William
   Herschel, and the calculation of the mass of the Sun using Newton's
   theory of universal gravitation. These series of discoveries had a
   momentous effect on both pragmatic commerce and philosophy. The
   excitement engendered by creating a new and orderly vision of the
   world, as well as the need for a philosophy of science which could
   encompass the new discoveries, greatly influenced both religious and
   secular ideas. If Newton could order the cosmos with natural
   philosophy, so, many argued, could political philosophy order the body
   politic.

   Within the Enlightenment, two main theories contended to be the basis
   of that ordering: divine right and natural law. It might seem that
   divine right would yield absolutist ideas, and that natural law would
   lead to theories of liberty. The writing of Jacques-Benigne Bossuet
   (1627-1704) set the paradigm for the divine right: that the universe
   was ordered by a reasonable God, and therefore his representative on
   earth had the powers of that God. The orderliness of the cosmos was
   seen as proof of God; therefore it was a proof of the power of
   monarchy. Natural law, began, not as a reaction against divinity, but
   instead, as an abstraction: God did not rule arbitrarily, but through
   natural laws that he enacted on earth. Thomas Hobbes, though an
   absolutist in government, drew this argument in Leviathan. Once the
   concept of natural law was invoked, however, it took on a life of its
   own. If natural law could be used to bolster the position of the
   monarchy, it could also be used to assert the rights of subjects of
   that monarch, that if there were natural laws, then there were natural
   rights associated with them, just as there are rights under man-made
   laws.

   What both theories had in common was the need for an orderly and
   comprehensible function of government. The "Enlightened Despotism" of,
   for example, Catherine the Great of Russia and Frederick the Great of
   Prussia (a state within The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation), is
   not based on mystical appeals to authority, but on the pragmatic
   invocation of state power as necessary to hold back chaotic and
   anarchic warfare and rebellion. Frederick the Great was raised by his
   French governess, importing the Enlightenment to "Germany."
   Regularization and standardization were seen as good things because
   they allowed the state to reach its power outwards over the entirety of
   its domain and because they liberated people from being entangled in
   endless local custom. Additionally, they expanded the sphere of
   economic and social activity.

   Thus rationalization, standardization and the search for fundamental
   unities occupied much of the Enlightenment and its arguments over
   proper methodology and nature of understanding. The culminating efforts
   of the Enlightenment: for example the economics of Adam Smith, the
   physical chemistry of Antoine Lavoisier, the idea of evolution pursued
   by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, the declaration by Jefferson of inalienable
   rights, in the end overshadowed the idea of divine right and direct
   alteration of the world by the hand of God. It was also the basis for
   overthrowing the idea of a completely rational and comprehensible
   universe, and led, in turn, to the metaphysics of Hegel and
   Romanticism.

Role of the Enlightenment in later philosophy

   The Enlightenment occupies a central role in the justification for the
   movement known as modernism. The neo-classicizing trend in modernism
   came to see itself as being a period of rationality which was
   overturning foolishly established traditions, and therefore analogized
   itself to the Encyclopediasts and other philosophes. A variety of 20th
   century movements, including liberalism and neo-classicism traced their
   intellectual heritage back to the Enlightenment, and away from the
   purported emotionalism of the 19th century. Geometric order, rigor and
   reductionism were seen as virtues of the Enlightenment. The modern
   movement points to reductionism and rationality as crucial aspects of
   Enlightenment thinking of which it is the inheritor, as opposed to
   irrationality and emotionalism. In this view, the Enlightenment
   represents the basis for modern ideas of liberalism against
   superstition and intolerance. Influential philosophers who have held
   this view are Jürgen Habermas and Isaiah Berlin.

   This view asserts that the Enlightenment was the point where Europe
   broke through what historian Peter Gay calls "the sacred circle," where
   previous dogma circumscribed thinking. The Enlightenment is held, in
   this view, to be the source of critical ideas, such as the centrality
   of freedom, democracy and reason as being the primary values of a
   society. This view argues that the establishment of a contractual basis
   of rights would lead to the market mechanism and capitalism, the
   scientific method, religious and racial tolerance, and the organization
   of states into self-governing republics through democratic means. In
   this view, the tendency of the philosophes in particular to apply
   rationality to every problem is considered to be the essential change.
   From this point on, thinkers and writers were held to be free to pursue
   the truth in whatever form, without the threat of sanction for
   violating established ideas.

   With the end of the Second World War and the rise of post-modernity,
   these same features came to be regarded as liabilities - excessive
   specialization, failure to heed traditional wisdom or provide for
   unintended consequences, and the romanticization of Enlightenment
   figures - such as the Founding Fathers of the United States, prompted a
   backlash against both Science and Enlightenment based dogma in general.
   Philosophers such as Michel Foucault are often understood as arguing
   that the age of reason had to construct a vision of unreason as being
   demonic and subhuman, and therefore evil and befouling, whence by
   analogy to argue that rationalism in the modern period is, likewise, a
   construction. In their book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer
   and Theodor Adorno wrote a penetrating critique of what they perceived
   as the contradictions of Enlightenment thought: Enlightenment was seen
   as being at once liberatory and, through the domination of instrumental
   rationality tending towards totalitarianism.

   Alternatively, the Enlightenment was used as a powerful symbol to argue
   for the supremacy of rationalism and rationalization, and therefore any
   attack on it was connected to despotism and madness, for example in the
   writings of Gertrude Himmelfarb.

Important figures of the Enlightenment era

     * Kant | French Encyclopédistes | Voltaire | Leibniz | Lord Monboddo,
       Jean-Jacques Rousseau | Condorcet | Helvétius | Fontenelle | Olympe
       de Gouges | Ignacy Krasicki | Francois Quesney | Benedict Spinoza |
       Cesare Beccaria | Adam Smith | Isaac Newton | John Wilkes | Antoine
       Lavoisier | Mikhail Lomonosov | Mikhailo Shcherbatov | Ekaterina
       Dashkova | Montesquieu | Mary Wollstonecraft |
     * Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783) French. Mathematician and
       physicist, one of the editors of Encyclopédie
     * Thomas Abbt (1738-1766) German. Promoted what would later be called
       Nationalism in Vom Tode für's Vaterland (On dying for one's
       nation).
     * Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) French. Literary critic known for
       Nouvelles de la république des lettres and Dictionnaire historique
       et critique.
     * G.L. Buffon (1707-1788) French. Author of "L'Histoire Naturelle"
       who considered Natural Selection and the similarities between
       humans and apes.
     * James Burnett Lord Monboddo Scottish. Philosopher, jurist,
       pre-evolutionary thinker and contributor to linguistic evolution.
       See Scottish Enlightenment
     * James Boswell (1740-1795) Scottish. Biographer of Samuel Johnson,
       helped established the norms for writing Biography in general.
     * Edmund Burke (1729-1797) Irish. Parliamentarian and political
       philosopher, best known for pragmatism, considered important to
       both liberal and conservative thinking.
     * Denis Diderot (1713-1784) French. Founder of the Encyclopédie,
       speculated on free will and attachment to material objects,
       contributed to the theory of literature.
     * Ignacy Krasicki (1735-1801) Polish. Outstanding poet of the Polish
       Enlightenment, hailed by contemporaries as "the Prince of Poets."
       After the election of Stanisław August Poniatowski as king of
       Poland in 1764, Krasicki became the new King's confidant and
       chaplain. He participated in the King's famous "Thursday dinners"
       and co-founded the Monitor, the preeminent periodical of the Polish
       Enlightenment, sponsored by the King. Consecrated Bishop of Warmia
       in 1766, Krasicki thereby also became an ex-officio Senator of the
       Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
     * Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) American. Statesman, scientist,
       political philosopher, pragmatic deist, author. As a philosopher
       known for his writings on nationality, economic matters, aphorisms
       published in Poor Richard's Alamanac and polemics in favour of
       American Independence. Involved with writing the Declaration of
       Independence and the Constitution of 1787.
     * Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) English. Historian best known for his
       Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
     * Johann Gottfried von Herder German. Theologian and Linguist.
       Proposed that language determines thought, introduced concepts of
       ethnic study and nationalism, influential on later Romantic
       thinkers. Early supporter of democracy and republican self rule.
     * David Hume Scottish. Historian, philosopher and economist. Best
       known for his empiricism and scientific skepticism, advanced
       doctrines of naturalism and material causes. Influenced Kant and
       Adam Smith.
     * Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) German. Philosopher and physicist.
       Established critical philosophy on a systematic basis, proposed a
       material theory for the origin of the solar system, wrote on ethics
       and morals. Influenced by Hume and Isaac Newton. Important figure
       in German Idealism, and important to the work of Fichte and Hegel.
     * Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) American. Statesman, political
       philosopher, educator. As a philosopher best known for the United
       States Declaration of Independence (1776) and his interpretation of
       the United States Constitution (1787) which he pursued as
       president. Argued for natural rights as the basis of all states,
       argued that violation of these rights negates the contract which
       bind a people to their rulers and that therefore there is an
       inherent "Right to Revolution."
     * Adam Weishaupt (1748-1830) German who founded the Order of the
       Illuminati.
     * Hugo Kołłątaj (1750-1812) Polish. He was active in the Commission
       for National Education and the Society for Elementary Textbooks,
       and reformed the Kraków Academy, of which he was rector in
       1783-1786. An organizer of the townspeople's movement, in 1789 he
       edited a memorial from the cities. He co-authored the Polish
       Constitution of May 3, 1791, and founded the Assembly of Friends of
       the Government Constitution to assist in the document's
       implementation. In 1791-1792 he served as Crown Vice Chancellor. In
       1794 he took part in the Kościuszko Uprising, co-authoring its
       Uprising Act (March 24, 1794) and Proclamation of Połaniec (May 7,
       1794), heading the Supreme National Council's Treasury Department,
       and backing the Uprising's left, Jacobin wing.
     * Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) German Dramatist, critic,
       political philosopher. Created theatre in the German language,
       began reappraisal of Shakespeare to being a central figure, and the
       importance of classical dramatic norms as being crucial to good
       dramatic writing, theorized that the centre of political and
       cultural life is the middle class.
     * John Locke (1632-1704) English Philosopher. Important empricist who
       expanded and extended the work of Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes.
       Seminal thinker in the realm of the relationship between the state
       and the individual, the contractual basis of the state and the rule
       of law. Argued for personal liberty with respect to property.
     * Leandro Fernández de Moratín (1760-1828) Spanish. Dramatist and
       translator, support of republicanism and free thinking.
       Transitional figure to Romanticism.
     * Montesquieu (1689-1755) French political thinker. He is famous for
       his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, taken for
       granted in modern discussions of government and implemented in many
       constitutions all over the world.
     * Nikolay Novikov (1744-1818) Russian. Philanthropist and journalist
       who sought to raise the culture of Russian readers and publicly
       argued with the Empress. See Russian Enlightenment for other
       prominent figures.
     * Thomas Paine (1737-1809) English. Pamphleteer, Deist, and
       polemicist, most famous for Common Sense attacking England's
       domination of the colonies in America.
     * Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos. Main figure of the Spanish
       Enlightment. Preminent stateman.

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