Yahoo Web Search

Search results

  1. [6] [7] [8] European historians traditionally dated its beginning with the death of Louis XIV of France in 1715 and its end with the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Many historians now date the end of the Enlightenment as the start of the 19th century, with the latest proposed year being the death of Immanuel Kant in 1804. [9]

    • When Did It Begin?
    • What Changed?
    • Widespread Ramifications

    When exactly the Enlightenment began is a subject of debate. Most see the ‘Dawn of Reason’ as having spanned between the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, from the mid-1600s to the late 18th century. However, the timescale is not all that important – what really matters is the thinking and radical ideas behind i...

    New ideas and new ways of thinking slowly began to spread throughout Europe and the invention of the printing press helped these ideas spread. In Italy the likes of Michael Angelo, Brunelleschi, and Leonardo Da Vinci sparked a revolution in cultural and artistic expression, while scientists such as Giordano Brunoand Galileo Galilei made discoveries...

    Such thinking naturally flew in the face of the establishment. These new thinkers retained their religious devotion, but increasingly saw the Catholic Church as their natural enemy – a force which had enslaved mankind. Governments too came under threat as Enlightenment thinking spread across Europe and into the New World where it underpinned first ...

  2. Sources of Enlightenment thought. In a cosmopolitan culture it was the preeminence of the French language that enabled Frenchmen of the 17th century to lay the foundations of cultural ascendancy and encouraged the philosophes to act as the tutors of 18th-century Europe.

  3. 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 Middle Ages—the period in European history lasting from roughly the fifth century to the fifteenth.

  4. In 1784, German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that an "enlightened" understanding should start with the command: " Dare to know !" 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.

  5. Causes. On the surface, the most apparent cause of the Enlightenment was the Thirty Years’ War. This horribly destructive war, which lasted from 1618 to 1648, compelled German writers to pen harsh criticisms regarding the ideas of nationalism and warfare.

  1. People also search for