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-laid the foundation for modern ideas
-created new roles in life
-greek developed philosophy

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the ancient cultures laid the foundation of many modern ideas. it created new roles in life it led to the greek developing philosophy . rome was another ancient culture that developed during the enlightenment

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- the enlightenment 1685-1815
- age of reason
- produced books, essays, inventions, scientific discoveries, laws, wars, and revolutions

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" a european intellecuall movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which ideas concerning god, nature, reason, and humanity were synthesized into a worldview that gained wide asset in the west" . The enlightenment was a big part in european history and caused many invention we still use to this day.

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French:

siècle des Lumières (literally "century of the Enlightened")

When and where did the Enlightenment take place?

What led to the Enlightenment?

Who were some of the major figures of the Enlightenment?

What were the most important ideas of the Enlightenment?

What were some results of the Enlightenment?

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. Central to Enlightenment thought were the use and celebration of reason, the power by which humans understand the universe and improve their own condition. The goals of rational humanity were considered to be knowledge, freedom, and happiness.

A brief treatment of the Enlightenment follows. For full treatment, see Europe, history of: The Enlightenment.

The age of reason: human understanding of the universe

The powers and uses of reason had first been explored by the philosophers of ancient Greece. The Romans adopted and preserved much of Greek culture, notably including the ideas of a rational natural order and natural law. Amid the turmoil of empire, however, a new concern arose for personal salvation, and the way was paved for the triumph of the Christian religion. Christian thinkers gradually found uses for their Greco-Roman heritage. The system of thought known as Scholasticism, culminating in the work of Thomas Aquinas, resurrected reason as a tool of understanding. In Thomas's presentation, Aristotle provided the method for obtaining that truth which was ascertainable by reason alone; since Christian revelation contained a higher truth, Thomas placed the natural law evident to reason subordinate to, but not in conflict with, eternal law and divine law.

The intellectual and political edifice of Christianity, seemingly impregnable in the Middle Ages, fell in turn to the assaults made on it by humanism, the Renaissance, and the Protestant Reformation. Humanism bred the experimental science of Francis Bacon, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Galileo and the mathematical investigations of René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Isaac Newton. The Renaissance rediscovered much of Classical culture and revived the notion of humans as creative beings, and the Reformation, more directly but in the long run no less effectively, challenged the monolithic authority of the Roman Catholic Church. For Martin Luther, as for Bacon or Descartes, the way to truth lay in the application of human reason. Both the Renaissance and the Reformation were less movements for intellectual liberty than changes of authority, but, since they appealed to different authorities, they contributed to the breakdown of the community of thought. Received authority, whether of Ptolemy in the sciences or of the church in matters of the spirit, was to be subject to the probings of unfettered minds.

The successful application of reason to any question depended on its correct application-on the development of a methodology of reasoning that would serve as its own guarantee of validity. Such a methodology was most spectacularly achieved in the sciences and mathematics, where the logics of induction and deduction made possible the creation of a sweeping new cosmology. The formative influence for the Enlightenment was not so much content as method. The great geniuses of the 17th century confirmed and amplified the concept of a world of calculable regularity, but, more importantly, they seemingly proved that rigorous mathematical reasoning offered the means, independent of God's revelation, of establishing truth. The success of Newton, in particular, in capturing in a few mathematical equations the laws that govern the motions of the planets, gave great impetus to a growing faith in the human capacity to attain knowledge. At the same time, the idea of the universe as a mechanism governed by a few simple-and discoverable-laws had a subversive effect on the concepts of a personal God and individual salvation that were central to Christianity.

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Enlightenment | Definition, Summary, Ideas, Meaning, History, Philosophers, & Facts

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Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries that emphasized the use of reason to advance understanding of the universe and to improve the human condition. The goals of the Enlightenment were knowledge, freedom, and happiness.

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- a european intellecuall
- 17- 18th centuries
- wide asset in the west

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the enlightenment 1685-1815 also known as the age of reason. the enlightenment produced many books, essays, inventions, scientific discoveries, laws, wars, and revolutions.

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European politics, philosophy, science and communications were radically reoriented during the course of the "long 18th century" (1685-1815) as part of a movement referred to by its participants as the Age of Reason, or simply the Enlightenment. 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 Enlightenment produced numerous books, essays, inventions, scientific discoveries, laws, wars and revolutions. The American and French Revolutions were directly inspired by Enlightenment ideals and respectively marked the peak of its influence and the beginning of its decline. The Enlightenment ultimately gave way to 19th-century Romanticism.

The Early Enlightenment: 1685-1730

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 years Isaac Newton published his "Principia Mathematica" (1686) and John Locke his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1689)-two works that provided the scientific, mathematical and philosophical toolkit for the Enlightenment's major advances.

Did you know? In his essay 'What Is Enlightenment?' (1784), the German philosopher Immanuel Kant summed up the era's motto in the following terms: 'Dare to know! Have courage to use your own reason!'

Locke argued that human nature was mutable and that knowledge was gained through accumulated experience rather than by accessing some sort of outside truth. Newton's calculus and optical theories provided the powerful Enlightenment metaphors for precisely measured change and illumination.

There was no single, unified Enlightenment. Instead, it is possible to speak of the French Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment and the English, German, Swiss or American Enlightenment. Individual Enlightenment thinkers often had very different approaches. Locke differed from David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau from Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson from Frederick the Great. Their differences and disagreements, though, emerged out of the common Enlightenment themes of rational questioning and belief in progress through dialogue.

The High Enlightenment: 1730-1780

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 rationally demystified and cataloged. The signature publication of the period was Diderot's "Encyclopédie" (1751-77), which brought together leading authors to produce an ambitious compilation of human knowledge.

It was an age of enlightened despots like Frederick the Great, who unified, rationalized and modernized Prussia in between brutal multi-year wars with Austria, and of enlightened would-be revolutionaries like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, whose "Declaration of Independence" (1776) framed the American Revolution in terms taken from of Locke's essays.

It was also a time of religious (and anti-religious) innovation, as Christians sought to reposition their faith along rational lines and deists and materialists argued that the universe seemed to determine its own course without God's intervention. Locke, along with French philosopher Pierre Bayle, began to champion the idea of the separation of Church and State. Secret societies-like the Freemasons, the Bavarian Illuminati and the Rosicrucians-flourished, offering European men (and a few women) new modes of fellowship, esoteric ritual and mutual assistance. Coffeehouses, newspapers and literary salons emerged as new venues for ideas to circulate.

The Late Enlightenment and Beyond: 1780-1815

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 early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (mother of "Frankenstein" author Mary Shelley) and inspired both the Haitian war of independence and the radical racial inclusivism of Paraguay's first post-independence government.

Enlightened rationality gave way to the wildness of Romanticism, but 19th-century Liberalism and Classicism-not to mention 20th-century Modernism -all owe a heavy debt to the thinkers of the Enlightenment.

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European politics, philosophy, science and communications were radically reoriented during the course of the "long 18th century" (1685-1815) as part of a movement referred to by its participants as the Age of Reason, or simply the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers in Britain, in France and throughout Europe questioned traditional authority and embraced the notion that humanity could be improved through rational change.