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  1. The Enlightenment

    The Enlightenment (Age of Reason) was a revolution in thought in Europe and North America from the late 17th century to the late 18th century. The Enlightenment involved new approaches in philosophy, science, and politics.Above all, the human capacity for reason was championed as the tool by which our knowledge could be extended, individual liberty maintained, and happiness secured.

  2. Enlightenment

    Enlightenment. The heart of the eighteenth century Enlightenment is the loosely organized activity of prominent French thinkers of the mid-decades of the eighteenth century, the so-called " philosophes " (e.g., Voltaire, D'Alembert, Diderot, Montesquieu). The philosophes constituted an informal society of men of letters who collaborated ...

  3. Enlightenment

    Summarize This Article Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which ideas concerning God, reason, nature, and humanity were synthesized into a worldview that gained wide assent in the West and that instigated revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, and politics.Central to Enlightenment thought were the use and celebration of reason, the power ...

  4. Enlightenment Period: Thinkers & Ideas

    European politics, philosophy, science and communications were radically reoriented during the course of the "long 18th century" (1685-1815) as part of a movement referred to by its ...

  5. The Enlightenment period (article)

    The Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, was an intellectual and cultural movement in the eighteenth century that emphasized reason over superstition and science over blind faith.Using the power of the press, Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Voltaire questioned accepted knowledge and spread new ideas about openness, investigation, and religious tolerance ...

  6. A beginner's guide to the Age of Enlightenment

    The Enlightenment thinkers also discussed other ideas that are the founding principles of any democracy—the idea of the importance of the individual who can reason for himself, the idea of equality under the law, and the idea of natural rights. The Enlightenment was a period of profound optimism, a sense that with science and reason—and the ...

  7. The Enlightenment (1650-1800): Overview

    Overview. The Enlightenment was a sprawling intellectual, philosophical, cultural, and social movement that spread through England, France, Germany, and other parts of Europe during the 1700s. Enabled by the Scientific Revolution, which had begun as early as 1500, the Enlightenment represented about as big of a departure as possible from the ...

  8. The Enlightenment

    Introduction. The Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Enlightenment, was a philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe in the 18th century. It was centered around the idea that reason is the primary source of authority and legitimacy, and it advocated such ideals as liberty, progress, tolerance, fraternity ...

  9. Western philosophy

    Western philosophy - Reason, Science, Progress: Although they both lived and worked in the late 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke (1632-1704) were the true fathers of the Enlightenment. Newton was the last of the scientific geniuses of the age, and his great Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687; Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) was the culmination of ...

  10. Introduction to Enlightenment

    The Enlightenment was a broad intellectual tendency, spanning philosophy, literature, language, art, religion and political theory, which lasted from around 1680 until the end of the eighteenth century. Conventionally, the Enlightenment has been called the "age of reason," though this designation is now regarded as somewhat reductive since ...

  11. The Enlightenment

    The Enlightenment was a philosophical movement that dominated in Europe during the 18th century. It was centered around the idea that reason is the primary source of authority and legitimacy, and it advocated such ideals as liberty, progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.

  12. What Is Enlightenment?

    A number of leading intellectuals replied with essays, of which Kant's is the most famous and has had the most impact. Kant's opening paragraph of the essay is a much-cited definition of a lack of enlightenment as people's inability to think for themselves due not to their lack of intellect, but lack of courage.

  13. Introduction: The Enlightenment and its Future

    Kant on enlightenment. In 1784 there was a striking, and in some ways peculiar, moment in intellectual history: a philosopher addressed himself to his future—to the heirs of the process we now in retrospect talk of as the Enlightenment. The moment comes in a short essay by Immanuel Kant, called Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan ...

  14. John Locke

    John Locke - Enlightenment, Philosophy, Reason: Locke remained in Holland for more than five years (1683-89). While there he made new and important friends and associated with other exiles from England. He also wrote his first Letter on Toleration, published anonymously in Latin in 1689, and completed An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. A dominant theme of the Essay is the question with ...

  15. What Is the Enlightenment and How Did It Transform Politics?

    Enlightenment scholars believed that such thinking could produce societies that were more equitable and just. Enlightenment thinkers wanted to free the masses from the unchecked power of monarchs and religious leaders. Let's explore five influential ideas that emerged from the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries:

  16. A Summary and Analysis of Immanuel Kant's 'What is Enlightenment?'

    By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) 'What is Enlightenment?', full title 'Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?', is a 1784 essay by the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). As the longer title suggests, Kant's essay is a response to a question (posed by a clergyman, Reverend Johann Friedrich Zöllner) concerning the nature of philosophical enlightenment.

  17. Enlightenment Philosophers: The Four Main Ideas

    Find what the main idea is of the philosophers. All four philosophers, John Locke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Voltaire, and Smith, believed in freedom and people's rights. John believed in freedom, equality, and liberty. Mary believed that women are capable of reaching equality and should be given natural rights.

  18. What were the most important ideas of the Enlightenment?

    The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. It was thought during the Enlightenment that human reasoning could discover truths about the world, religion, and politics and could be used to improve the lives of humankind. Skepticism about received wisdom was another important idea; everything was to be subjected to testing and rational analysis.

  19. READ: The Enlightenment (article)

    The Enlightenment shook the foundations of European intellectual life, but that wasn't all. It also had social, economic, and political consequences across the globe. To understand the role of the Enlightenment in world history, we need to look both at its ideas and their social setting. These were not sudden, light-bulb-above-your head ideas.

  20. Enlightenment Philosophers: What Was Their Main Idea?

    The purpose of these discussions helped form the democratic world, and still affects the world today. The Age of Enlightenment, also called The Age of Reason, was a time of historians with intelligent ideas. One of the four philosophers that had a unique idea on how to improve society was John Locke. John Locke believed in self-government.

  21. Full article: The enlightenment and its critics1

    Enlightenment, French siècle des Lumières (literally 'century of the Enlightened'), German Aufklärung, a European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which ideas concerning God, reason, nature, and humanity were synthesized into a worldview that gained wide assent in the West and that instigated revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, and politics.

  22. Enlightenment

    Enlightenment - Reason, Religion, Philosophy: The method of reason was applied to religion, and the product was Deism. The Enlightenment also produced the first modern secularized theories of psychology and ethics. Society came to be seen as a social contract, and the state as a mutually beneficial arrangement among humans based on natural rights and functioning as a political democracy.

  23. 18 Key Thinkers of the Enlightenment

    Louis-Michel van Loo/Flickr/CC0 1.0 Originally the son of artisans, Diderot first entered the church before leaving and working as a law clerk. He achieved fame in the Enlightenment era chiefly for editing arguably the key text, his Encyclopédie, which took up over 20 years of his life.However, he wrote widely on science, philosophy, and the arts, as well as plays and fiction, but left many ...