The Enlightenment :: European Europe History

The EnlightenmentThe Enlightenment is a name given by historians to an intellectual movement that was predominant in the Western world during the eighteenth century. Strongly influenced by the rise of modern scholarship and by the airstream of the long religious conflict that followed the Reformation, the implyers of the Enlightenment (called philosophes in France) were committed to layperson views based on reason or tender understanding only, which they hoped would run a basis for beneficial changes affecting every area of brio and thought.The more extreme and radical philosophes-Denis Diderot, Claude Adrien Helvetius, Baron dHolbach, the Marquis de Condorcet, and Julien Offroy de La Mettrie (1709-51)--advocated a philosophical rationalism deriving its methods from science and natural philosophy that would flip religion as the means of knowing nature and destiny of piece these men were materialists, pantheists, or atheists. Other savant thinkers, such as capital of South D akota Bayle, Voltaire, David Hume, Jean Le Rond Dalembert, and Immanuel Kant, opposed fanaticism, but were either agnostic or left room for some kind of religious faith.All of the philosophes aphorism themselves as continuing the work of the great 17th century pioneers-Francis Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Leibnitz, Isaac Newton, and illusion Locke-who had developed fruitful methods of rational and empirical inquiry and had demonstrated the initiative of a world remade by the application of knowledge for human benefit. The philosophes believed that science could reveal nature as it truly is and show how it could be controlled and manipulated. This sentiment provided an incentive to extend scientific methods into every field of inquiry, thus lay the groundwork for the development of the modern social sciences.The enlightened understanding of human nature was one that emphasized the right to self-expression and human fulfillment, the right to think freely and express ones views publ icly without censorship or fear of repression. Voltaire prize the freedom he found in England and fostered the spread of English ideas on the Continent. He and his followers opposed the intolerance of the established Christian churches of their day, as well as the European governments that controlled and suppressed dissenting opinions. For example, the social disorder which Pangloss caught from Paquette was traced to a very learned Franciscan and later to a Jesuit. Also, Candide reminisces that his heating plant for Cunegonde first developed at a Mass. More conservative enlightened thinkers, concerned primarily with efficiency and administrative order, favored the enlightened monocracy of such monarchs as Emperor Joseph II, Frederick II of Prussia, and Catherine II of Russia.