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Dec 16, 2009 · Enlightenment thinkers in Britain, in France and throughout Europe questioned traditional authority and embraced the notion that humanity could be improved through rational change. The...
- Missy Sullivan
- 3 min
Feb 29, 2024 · 10 Key Enlightenment Thinkers. Having set the foundation, then, a new wave of thinkers set about building a new edifice of Western knowledge. Disagreeing just as often they agreed with each other, all of the thinkers had the common objective of finding a better world to live in.
- Mark Cartwright
- Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’ 1717 – 1783. The illegitimate son of hostess Mme de Tencin, Alembert was named after the church on whose steps he was abandoned.
- Beccaria, Cesare 1738 - 1794. The Italian author of On Crimes and Punishments, published in 1764, Beccaria argued for punishment to be secular, rather than based on religious judgments of sin, and for legal reforms including the end of capital punishment and judicial torture.
- Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc 1707 – 1788. The son of a highly ranked legal family, Buffon changed from legal education to science and contributed to the Enlightenment with works on natural history, in which he rejected the biblical chronology of the past in favor of the Earth being older and flirted with the idea that species could change.
- Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat 1743 – 1794. One of the leading thinkers of the late Enlightenment, Condorcet focused largely on science and mathematics, producing important works on probability and writing for the Encyclopédie.
Aug 20, 2010 · The Enlightenment is often associated with its political revolutions and ideals, especially the French Revolution of 1789. The energy created and expressed by the intellectual foment of Enlightenment thinkers contributes to the growing wave of social unrest in France in the eighteenth century.
Mar 4, 2024 · The big five Enlightenment thinkers in terms of who inspired the most discussion were John Locke (natural rights and liberty), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (a fairer society), Adam Smith (founder of modern economics), Immanuel Kant (turned philosophy upside down), and Thomas Paine (called for revolution).
- Mark Cartwright
- Publishing Director
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.
In several places these Enlightenment ideas brought fundamental changes undermining religious authority, ushering in religious toleration, freedom of thought, and fueled revolutionary action in some. This alphabetical list of intellectuals includes figures largely from Western Europe and British North America.
