The Enlightenment The Enlightenment 18 th Century Intellectual Movement.
Renaissance + Scientific Revolution =. The Enlightenment The major intellectual and cultural...
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Transcript of Renaissance + Scientific Revolution =. The Enlightenment The major intellectual and cultural...
The Enlightenment
The major intellectual and cultural movement of the 18th century,
characterized by a pronounced faith in the power of human knowledge to solve basic
problems of existence.
1680-1789 or 1815?
You decide!
Age of Reason and Science
• Responses to mysticism, religion and superstition of Middle Ages.
• Reason and Rationality became the new God.
• Led to the Scientific Revolution
• Didactic– meant to help teach• Dialectic–logical arguments• Patriarchal– father figure• Heresiarchal– heretical thought
Death to Dark Ages
• Intellectuals during the Enlightenment turned a critical eye on nearly all received traditions in Europe. Political traditions; social and economic structures; attitudes toward the past; ideas about human nature; theories of knowledge, science, philosophy, aesthetics, and morals; and, above all, the doctrines and institutions of Christianity were subjected to analysis.
• Enlightenment writers aimed at tearing down old structures, and rebuilding with firm scientific foundations for the presumed natural order of things.
5 Main Ideas• Reason– Absence of intolerance, bigotry, or prejudice.
• Nature-- What was natural was good and reasonable. Natural laws of economics and politics, just like law of motion.
• Happiness– Someone who lives by nature’s laws will find happiness. Be happy on earth, don’t wait for Heaven.
• Progress– Societal progress to point of human and societal perfection.
• Liberty– In response to Glorious Revolution, belief that reason could set society free.
The Philosophes
• The thinkers of the Enlightenment• Met in the Salons, coffee shops,
universities, and restaurants• Wanted to apply scientific method to all
ideas, including government and religion.
Voltaire’s Friends in High Places
“What great victories reason is winning among us!”
Catherine The Great Frederick II Russia Prussia
Deists
Believers in Deism, described as the religion of reason rejected Christianity as a body of
revelation, mysterious and incomprehensible. God’s revelation,
believed Deists, was simple, logical and clear-cut, a natural religion which always
existed.