![]() ![]() Aside from these universal principles and beliefs, religions in their particularity were largely banished from the public square. (A later, religious reaction against the church’s dogmatic outlook was the Pietist movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.)Įnlightenment thinkers reduced religion to those essentials which could only be “rationally” defended, i.e., certain basic moral principles and a few universally held beliefs about God. the theory of the divine right of kings in the Church of England.“Jesuit scholasticism” (sometimes called the “second scholasticism”) by the Counter-Reformation, and. ![]() Protestant scholasticism by Lutheran and Calvinist divines,.The intellectual leaders of the Enlightenment regarded themselves as a courageous elite who would lead the world into progress from a long period of doubtful tradition and ecclesiastical tyranny, which had resulted in the bloody Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) and the English Civil War (1642-1651). It helped create the intellectual framework not only for the American Revolutionary War and liberalism, democracy and capitalism but also the French Revolution, racism, nationalism, secularism, fascism, and communism. Its political thought developed by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704), Voltaire (1694-1778) and Rousseau (1712-1788) created the modern world. The general decline of the church, the growth of secular humanism and political and economic liberalism, the belief in progress, and the development of science are among its fruits. The legacy of the Enlightenment has been of enormous consequence for the modern world. Criticism of the Enlightenment has expressed itself in a variety of forms, such as religious conservatism, postmodernism, and feminism. Romanticism, with its emphasis upon imagination, spontaneity, and passion, emerged also as a reaction against the dry intellectualism of rationalists. Also, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who referred to Sapere aude! (Dare to know!) as the motto of the Enlightenment, ended up criticizing the Enlightenment confidence on the power of reason. The age of Enlightenment is considered to have ended with the French Revolution, which had a violent aspect that discredited it in the eyes of many. Also, the wide availability of knowledge was made possible through the production of encyclopedias, serving the Enlightenment cause of educating the human race. Emboldened by the revolution in physics commenced by Newtonian kinematics, Enlightenment thinkers argued that reason could free humankind from superstition and religious authoritarianism that had brought suffering and death to millions in religious wars. The Enlightenment advocated reason as a means to establishing an authoritative system of aesthetics, ethics, government, and even religion, which would allow human beings to obtain objective truth about the whole of reality. From the perspective of socio-political phenomena, the period is considered to have begun with the close of the Thirty Years’ War (1648) and ended with the French Revolution (1789). It covers about a century and a half in Europe, beginning with the publication of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) and ending with Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781). The Age of Enlightenment, sometimes called the Age of Reason, refers to the time of the guiding intellectual movement, called The Enlightenment. The Enlightenment advocated reason as a means to establishing an authoritative system of aesthetics, ethics, government, and even religion, which would allow human beings to obtain objective truth about the whole of reality.Īn engraving from the 1772 edition of the Encyclopédie Truth, in the top center, is surrounded by light and unveiled by the figures to the right, Philosophy and Reason. The Scholar with His Student, Anonymous Flemish painter (circle of Gerard Thomas and Balthasar van den Bossche) / Wikimedia Commons ![]()
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