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The Age of Enlightenment (also the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment) was the intellectual and philosophical movement that occurred in Europe in the 17th and the 18th centuries.
- The Early Enlightenment: 1685-1730
- The High Enlightenment: 1730-1780
- The Late Enlightenment and Beyond: 1780-1815
The Enlightenment’s important 17th-century precursors included the Englishmen Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, the Frenchman René Descartes and the key natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution, including Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Its roots are usually traced to 1680s England, where in the span of three...
Centered on the dialogues and publications of the French “philosophes” (Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Buffon and Denis Diderot), the High Enlightenment might best be summed up by one historian’s summary of Voltaire’s “Philosophical Dictionary”: “a chaos of clear ideas.” Foremost among these was the notion that everything in the universe could be...
The French Revolution of 1789 was the culmination of the High Enlightenment vision of throwing out the old authorities to remake society along rational lines, but it devolved into bloody terror that showed the limits of its own ideas and led, a decade later, to the rise of Napoleon. Still, its goal of egalitarianism attracted the admiration of the ...
- Missy Sullivan
- 3 min
Mar 28, 2024 · 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.
- When and where did the Enlightenment take place?Historians place the Enlightenment in Europe (with a strong emphasis on France) during the late 17th and the 18th centuries, or, more comprehensive...
- What led to the Enlightenment?The roots of the Enlightenment can be found in the humanism of the Renaissance, with its emphasis on the study of Classical literature. The Protest...
- Who were some of the major figures of the Enlightenment?Some of the most important writers of the Enlightenment were the Philosophes of France, especially Voltaire and the political philosopher Montesqui...
- What were the most important ideas of the Enlightenment?It was thought during the Enlightenment that human reasoning could discover truths about the world, religion, and politics and could be used to imp...
- What were some results of the Enlightenment?The French Revolution and the American Revolution were almost direct results of Enlightenment thinking. The idea that society is a social contract...
Feb 29, 2024 · 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.
- Mark Cartwright
Aug 20, 2010 · The enthusiasm for reason in the Enlightenment is primarily not for the faculty of reason as an independent source of knowledge, which is embattled in the period, but rather for the human cognitive faculties generally; the Age of Reason contrasts with an age of religious faith, not with an age of sense experience.
The Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, was a philosophical movement in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries. At its core was a belief in the use and celebration of reason, the power by which humans understand the universe and improve their own condition.
Toward the middle of the eighteenth century a shift in thinking occurred. This shift is known as the Enlightenment. You have probably already heard of some important Enlightenment figures, like Rousseau, Diderot and Voltaire.
