The Enlightenment was a time of intelligence and growth. During the Enlightenment, people began to believe that all men were free people. The Declaration of Human Rights states that “men are born free and equal in rights”. This was a new concept for that time. People did not think of others as equal. Everyone was equal and could live their life according to their wishes, within certain guidelines. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The Enlightenment was an 18th-century European philosophical movement characterized by belief in the power of human reason and innovations in political, religious, and educational doctrine. This movement rejected social, traditional, political and religious norms and values ​​and adopted free thought for the development of new ideas and theories about human behavior and feelings. These new ways were then applied to political and social boundaries, changing people's opinions and thinking about government and directly influencing the development of the modern world. The Enlightenment represented a challenge to traditional religious views. Enlightenment thinkers were the liberals of their time. He brought ideas into moral and natural philosophy and moved away from metaphysics and the supernatural to focus on human nature and physics. Significantly, the Enlightenment represented the adoption of a critical attitude instead of cultural and intellectual traditions. The forty-volume L'Encyclopedie (1751–1772), compiled by the important Enlightenment thinkers Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (1717–1783), idealized the Enlightenment thinker, or philosophe, as one who “enslaves most minds” and “dares to think with his own head” (Diderot 1751, 5:270). A generation later, the German thinker Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) stated that “enlightenment is when a person emerges from his self-imposed immaturity. He defines immaturity as the inability to use one's understanding without the guidance of another. He described the purpose of enlightenment simply as “Dare to use your reason.”(1988,462). INTENSIFYING THE FIELDS OF SCIENTS The Enlightenment made use of new forms of brain exchange. David Hume (1711–1776) was known as one of the most important figures of the Enlightenment. He worked for the recognition of the difference between a question of facts and a question of values. He saw humanity as more prone to emotion than reason. He lamented the exclusivity of the previous generation and claimed to bring popular and learned knowledge into the socially capable world of polite conversation in academies, salons, debating societies etc. In his time, books became smaller, cheaper and more accessible. This has been witnessed since the time of the periodical press, newspapers and magazines. The literacy rate has increased among middle-class men, meaning that people read pamphlets, essays, and novels in their free time. IMPROVEMENT AND USEFULNESS Throughout the seventeenth century, European intellectuals argued over whether contemporary “modern” European thinkers had surpassed their “ancient” Greek and Roman counterparts, and this debate gave rise to the Enlightenment belief that ways better at thinking and behaving. decades. The sense of modern improvements led philosophers to believe that new ideas and methods would guarantee indefinite progress in politics, society, the arts, and the sciences. “If you look closely at the middle of our century, the events that concern us, our customs, our conquests and even our argumentsconversation, it's hard not to see that a truly remarkable change has occurred in many ways. our ideas; a change which, with its rapidity, seems to prefigure an even greater one. Only time will tell the purpose, nature and limits of this revolution, whose drawbacks and advantages our posterity will recognize better than we do. Power." Jean Le Rond d'Adrento The philosophes committed themselves to improving the social and natural environment through experiments and reforms. Societies and academies emerged, such as the English Royal Society, where innovative ideas and techniques were presented, discussed, and recommended. From agricultural techniques to zoological taxonomies, progressive reform was an important Enlightenment ideal associated with another Enlightenment principle: utility. Hume (1902, 183) wrote that “public utility is the only origin of justice.” In their emphasis on the principles of progress and utility, most Enlightenment thinkers were the heirs of the “moderns” in the dispute. between ancient and modern. PHYSICAL AND HUMAN NATURE The 16th and 17th centuries saw European thinkers challenge inherited ideas about the physical universe. Medieval thinkers had built elaborate cosmological systems on classical, and particularly Aristotelian, foundations. But in many fields, such as physics, applied mathematics and especially astronomy, new discoveries and explanations advanced by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) and Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), among to which others have challenged the image of a finite, Earth-centered universe and replaced it with a potentially infinite universe and a sun-centered system. Explanations of the physical universe therefore increasingly presented it as analogous to a mechanism, governed by rational rules, expressible mathematically, which a divine power may have created but with which it need not interfere. There were Enlightenment thinkers who were "atomists" but who believed that atoms were active (Leibniz, at least at one point in his career, was one of these). Nonetheless, the passive conception prevailed and it was this that entered into subsequent conceptions of how the universe was thought of by the Enlightenment. It was thought to consist of tiny hard passive particles. Rousseau's beliefs on human nature believe that all men in the state of nature are free and equal. In the state of nature, men are “noble savages”. It means that people are not born evil, but are corrupted by society and become evil. Enlightenment thinkers saw human nature in terms of a morally neutral tabula rasa, or tabula rasa, that could be shaped in various ways. They applied the idea of ​​a social tabula rasa, or state of nature, to explain how civil society could emerge and how it should be governed. Many Enlightenment thinkers, such as Hobbes, the Marquis d'Argenson (1694–1757), Montesquieu (1689–1755), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), argued that political stability could be guaranteed by organizing society as an where each component worked in harmony with the rest. Still others, such as Locke in his Second Treatise of Government (1689), used the idea of ​​the state of nature to define the boundaries of state power in ensuring political stability. RELIGION AND POLITICS Taking inspiration from the scientific revolution, which demonstrated that the physical world was governed by natural laws, men such as the English philosopher John Locke argued that similar laws applied to human affairs and could be discovered through reason. The protagonist of the Enlightenment also examined religion through the prism of reason. Rational Christianity, in its extreme form, held that God created the universe, established the laws of nature that made it work, and therefore did not interfere with the mechanism.This concept of God as watchmaker is known as deism. The Enlightenment, or the Age of Enlightenment, reorganized politics and governments in shocking ways. This cultural movement encompassed different types of philosophies, or approaches to thinking and exploring the world in general. Enlightened thinkers thought objectively and without prejudice. Reasoning, rationalism and empiricism were some of the schools of thought that made up the Enlightenment. A fascinating journey through Europe. In this important volume the reader is offered an extraordinarily incisive picture. Religion and politics in the Europe of the Enlightenment is a fundamental work that calls for renewed reflection on the great changes taking place in European society before the French Revolution and on the profoundly dynamic role played by religion and in particular by religious dissent in facilitating the difficult transition from the Ancien Regime to the modern world.” –Professor Mario Rosa, Scuola Normale Superiore. The Enlightenment and the Modern World Traditionally, the Enlightenment has been associated with France, America and Scotland rather than with Britain, which, strangely, is thought to have had no Enlightenment to speak of. Roy Porter effectively disrupts this view in Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World. Porter's general interest is in "the interaction between activists, ideas and society" and to this end he examines innovations in social, political, scientific, psychological and theological discourse. The key figures (the "enlightened thinkers") read like a Who's Who of the 17th and 18th centuries: Newton, Locke, Bernard de Mandeville, Erasmus Darwin, Priestley, Paine, Bentham and the British "principal Enlightenment couple" Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, as well as the men who helped popularize and spread their ideas, such as Addison, Steele, Defoe, Pope, and Sterne. The book is peppered with brilliant quotes, and although it covers such a vast topic quickly and sometimes breathlessly, Porter almost manages to keep it all together. In bringing the Enlightenment back to Britain, Porter also provides a persuasive general defense of the movement against its Foucaultian, feminist and/or postmodern critics who still 'paint it black'. It has been perpetually dismissed as "anything from superficial and intellectually naïve to a conspiracy of dead white men in wigs providing the intellectual basis for Western imperialism," and one of the book's strengths is that after reading it, one finds it difficult to understand how these "criticisms" acquired such influence in intellectual circles. The book's main flaw – as Porter is well aware – is that “too many themes are given short shrift”: literature and the arts, political debate, the formation of nationalism and more. Several, if not all, chapters deserved to be treated as a book, making this nearly 500-page work seem rather short. But if Enlightenment leaves the reader unsatisfied, it's in the best way: we would have liked to hear more from Porter rather than less. Rumor has it that he is already planning an encore. Larry Brown. This text refers to an out-of-print or unavailable edition of this title. Historians of the Enlightenment studied how each human society followed a definite and, for most philosophers, progressive development from a hypothetical state of nature to civilization. This “conjectural history” implied defined hierarchies of cultures, and the Enlightenment was an important period in the development of cultural particularism, which fueled the nationalist and racist ideologies of the nineteenth century. The Enlightenment involved the reform of thought in politics, economics, science, philosophy, and other fields. In this process Scotland retained an eminent position and influence andsignificant globally. Research into this phenomenon can link the 'enlightened' ideas of Scotland's great thinkers with material, practical and other developments 'back home' and can seek to understand the connections forged through the Enlightenment between Scotland and the rest of the world. The new scientific and rational perspective associated with the Enlightenment manifested itself in the technological advances that emerged from Enlightenment research and which facilitated the growth of industrial production and fueled the massive increase in consumption that characterized the 18th and 19th centuries. ENLIGHTENMENT AND POLITICAL REVOLUTIONS The heart of the 18th century The Enlightenment is the loosely organized activity of important French thinkers of the mid-18th century, the so-called “philosophes” (e.g. Voltaire, D'Alembert, Diderot, Montesquieu). The philosophes constituted an informal society of literati who collaborated on a vaguely defined Enlightenment project, exemplified by the Encyclopedia project (see 1.5 below). However, there are noteworthy centers of the Enlightenment outside of France as well. There is a renowned Scottish Enlightenment (key figures are Frances Hutcheson, Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Reid), a German Enlightenment (die Aufklärung, whose key figures include Christian Wolff, Moses Mendelssohn, GE Lessing and Immanuel Kant), and There are also other centers of the Enlightenment and Enlightenment thinkers scattered throughout Europe and America in the 18th century. What contributes to the unity of such tremendously different thinkers under the label of “Enlightenment”? For the purposes of this entry, the Enlightenment is conceived broadly. D'Alembert, a leading figure of the French Enlightenment, characterizes his 18th century, in full, as "the century of philosophy par excellence", due to the extraordinary intellectual and scientific progress of the time, but also due to the expectation of the era according to which philosophy (in the broad sense of the era, which includes the natural and social sciences) would significantly improve human life. Guided by D'Alembert's characterization of his century, the Enlightenment is here conceived as having its primary origin in the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. The rise of the new science progressively undermines not only the ancient geocentric conception of the cosmos, but also the set of assumptions that had served to constrain and guide philosophical inquiry in previous times. The extraordinary success of the new science in explaining the natural world promotes philosophy from the handmaiden of theology, bound by its purposes and methods, to an independent force with the power and authority to challenge the old and build the new, both in the realm of science than in that of nature. theory and practice, based on its own principles. Taking as the core of the Enlightenment the aspiration to intellectual progress and the belief in the power of such progress to improve human society and individual life, this entry includes descriptions of relevant aspects of the thought of earlier thinkers, such as Hobbes, Locke, Descartes, Bayle, Leibniz and Spinoza, thinkers whose contributions are indispensable for understanding the eighteenth century as "the century of philosophy par excellence". The Enlightenment is often associated with its political revolutions and ideals, particularly the French Revolution of 1789. The energy created and expressed by the intellectual foment of Enlightenment thinkers contributes to the rising tide of social unrest in 18th-century France. The social tensions culminate in the violent political upheaval that sweeps away the traditionally and hierarchically structured ancien régime (the monarchy, the privileges of the nobility, the political power of the Catholic Church). The French revolutionaries intended to establish in place of the ancien régime a new order based on reason that would establish ideals.