European Enlightenment

1680-1790

• a product of the Protestant Reformation
• intellectual "Age of Reason"
• world view change from religious to secular
• skepticism & religious skepticism
• pursuit of happiness: focus on the human condition
• diffusion of knowledge: books, pamphlets, publications, libraries, universities

key dates

• 1648: end of the 30 Years War (religious dispute was a core cause of the war)
• 1680: publication of Isaac Newton's Principio Mathematica
• 1688: Glorious Revolution in England
• 1682: Haley's comet & Bayle's "Reflections on Comets"

Enlightenment definitions

• disenchantment of the world
  • from Max Weber
  • attacking superstition
• political reform
  • applying reason to public policy
  • infrastructure projects
  • penal & criminal law enforcement and reform
    • vagrants and beggars

Enlightenment core ideas

• truth can be found through investigation
• self-government
  • Glorious Revolution: William of Orange takes power
    • transfer of power based on the public good and not dynastic divine rule

Enlightenment projects

Diderot's Encylopedie

• a tremendous project to catalog human knowledge
• = an exercise in "freedom of thought"
• had 28 volumes, 71,818 articles and 3,129 illustrations
• started by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert
• goals:
  • Diderot wrote that the purpose of the project was ""to change the way people think"
  • to disseminate (spread) knowledge across economic classes
  • to give more common people access to practical knowledge, especially mechanics
• it was the first encyclopedia to have independent contributors
• some of the ideas presented in the encyclopedia were considered radical
  • the French government banned it in 1759
  • the work supported religious freedom
  • many entries challenged religious doctrine
    • under the idea that knowledge is provable, the work treated religion as also subject to proof
    • the work attacked mysticism and superstition

==== taxonomy of human knowledge

Fig. 3: "Figurative system of human knowledge", the structure that the Encyclopédie organised knowledge into. It had three main branches: memory, reason, and imagination.

• the Encyclopedia organized knowledge into three main categories:
  • memory (factual knowledge)
  • reason (logic, deduction)
  • imagination (arts, literature)

Enlightenment thinkers

entry structure

=== section title: first, last, alphabetical by last name

• core ideas
• dates
• works

Pierre Bayle

• core ideas
  • religious skepticism and toleration
• 1682 Reflections on Comets
  • Hailey's comet as natural phenomenon and not a mysterious event
  • challenged superstition
• religious toleration

Cesare Beccaria

• On Crimes and Punishments
  • condemned torture and the death penality

Denis Diderot

• author, editor of l'Encyclopedie
• self-exiled to Switzerland to carry on the project in secret
• Diderot was a follower of Voltaire and deisms (that God exists but not as a distinct entity)
  • he later adopted materialism and atheism
  • he believed that religious truths should be subject to the same standards of proof as any other knowledge
• he also wrote plays and was a prominent art critic
• overall, Diderot's thoughts are expressed in these questions, as proposed by one of his biographers, Andrew S. Curran:
  • Why be moral in a world without god?
  • How should we appreciate art?
  • What are we and where do we come from?
  • What are sex and love?
  • How can a philosopher intervene in political affairs?
• Diderot quotation:
  • "posterity is for the philosopher what the 'other world' is for the man of religion."

Robert Hooke

David Hume

• the problem of induction
  • how do you know that the sun will rise tomorrow?
  • Greek verwion of hte question >>> todo
• reason will always be the slave of passion
• in 2020 Hume cancelled by modern "cancel culture"
  • Hume wrote a racist tract, "comments on matters of race" that posited that blacks were inferior beings
  • in 2020, Edinburgh University removed his name from a building on campus

= Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

• core ideas
• works:
  • Nathan the Wise, a play on religious tolerance

click EXPAND for details on Nathan the Wise and the "parable of the rings"

• • • a play about Nathan, a Jewish merchant who meets Saladin the Great, the Ottoman sultan and thus a core Islamic leader
    • Saladin asks Nathan which of the Abrahamic religions is the "true religion"
      • Abrahamic religions are Judaism, Christianity and Islam (in order of historical appearance)
    • Nathan avoids the question trap by answering with the "parable of the ring"
      • = a story about a magical ring that empowers the bearer God's approval ("pleasing to God")
        • i.e., the bearer's religion is the "true religion"
      • it is passed on by generation, until a father can't decide which of three sons to give it to
        • so he creates two exact copies and gives each son a ring
      • afterwards, the sons argue over who owns the actual ring
      • they take their dispute to a wise man who tells them
        • that perhaps all three rings are replicas, they cannot know
        • therefore, if each acts in such a way as God will be pleased, it would show that each ring has the magical power
        • i.e., God doesn't judge by one's religion but by one's actions

Isaac Newton

• Principio Mathematica
• launched idea of a divinely-ordered universe understandable by mathematics

Voltaire

• Candide: satire on Englightenment thought "best of all possible worlds" << to do