Modern Philosophy

The word now used for one of the most important threads of the Renaissance is "humanism" -- that is, an increasing focus on the temporal and personal over merely seeing this world as a gateway to the Christian afterlife.

Renaissance philosophy is the period of the history of philosophy in Europe that falls roughly between the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment. It includes the 15th century; some scholars extend it to as early as the 1350s or as late as the 16th century or early 17th century, overlapping the Reformation and the early modern era. Among the distinctive elements of Renaissance philosophy are the revival (renaissance means "rebirth") of classical civilization and learning; a partial return to the authority of Plato over Aristotle, who had come to dominate later medieval philosophy; and, among some philosophers, enthusiasm for the occult and Hermeticism.

As with all periods, there is a wide drift of dates, reasons for categorization and boundaries. In particular, the Renaissance, more than later periods, is thought to begin in Italy with the Italian Renaissance and roll through Europe. The English Renaissance is often thought to include Shakespeare, at a time when Italy had passed through Mannerism and to the Baroque. As importantly the 16th century is split differently (see lumpers and splitters). Some historians see the Reformation and Counter-Reformation as being separated from the Renaissance and more important for philosophy, while others see the entire era as one sweeping period.

History

The Renaissance as a movement is described as the reaching back for classical models in Medieval Europe, the search for naturalism over stylism in Art, the reemergence of mathematics as intimately related to philosophy. The triggers generally held to be important are the expansion of trade with China and India, the printing press, and the revival of learning. Greek was studied again in Italy in the mid 14th century, and in 1462 a "Platonic Academy" was founded in Florence by Cosimo de' Medici.

Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) wrote Oratio de Hominis Dignitate or Discourse on the Dignity of Man in 1486. Sometimes called "the manifesto of the Renaissance", it invokes Plato and Aristotle to argue for a conception of human worth which, while rooted in faith, spreads to a belief in the importance of the human ability to encompass all knowledge.

List of famous philosophers

• Petrarch (1304-1374)
• Leonardo Bruni (1374-1444)
• Lorenzo Valla (1405-1457)
• Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499)
• Pietro Pomponazzi (1462-1525)
• Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494)
• Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536)
• Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527)
• Thomas More (1478-1535)
• Francisco de Vitoria (c.1480–1546)
• Martin Luther (1483-1546)
• Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540)
• Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
• Giordano Bruno (1548-1600)
• Francisco Suárez (1548-1617)
• Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
• Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
• René Descartes (1596-1650)
• Nicholas of Cusa (1401 – 1464)
• Tommaso Campanella (1568 – 1639)
• Franciscus Patricius (1529 - 1597)
• Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679)
• Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531)

Movements of Note

• Heliocentrism
• Hermeticism
• Humanism
• Neoplatonism
• Secularism

See also

• Pico Project
• EMPHASIS: Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination Seminar

==17th-century philosophy== in the West is generally regarded as seeing the start of modern philosophy, and the shaking off of the medieval approach, especially scholasticism. It is often called the "Age of Reason" and is considered to succeed the Renaissance and precede the Age of Enlightenment. Alternatively, it may be seen as the earlier part of the Enlightenment.

Europe

In Western Philosophy, the period is usually taken to start in the seventeenth century with the work of René Descartes, who set much of the agenda as well as much of the methodology for those who came after him. The period is typified in Europe by the great system-builders — philosophers who present unified systems of epistemology, metaphysics, logic, and ethics, and often politics and the physical sciences too. Immanuel Kant classified his predecessors into two schools: the Rationalists and the Empiricists, and Early Modern Philosophy (as seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy is known) is often characterised in terms of a supposed conflict between these schools.Template:Fact This division is a considerable oversimplification, and it is important to be aware that the philosophers involved did not think of themselves as belonging to these schools, but as being involved in a single philosophical enterprise.Template:Fact

Although misleading in many ways, this classification has continued to be used to this day, especially when writing about the 17th and 18th centuries. The three main Rationalists are normally taken to have been Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz. Building upon their English predecessors Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, the three main Empiricists were John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. The former were distinguished by the belief that, in principle (though not in practice), all knowledge can be gained by the power of our reason alone; the latter rejected this, believing that all knowledge has to come through the senses, from experience. Thus the Rationalists took mathematics as their model for knowledge, and the Empiricists took the physical sciences.

This emphasis on epistemology is at the root of Kant's distinction; looking at the various philosophers in terms of their metaphysical, moral, or linguistic theories, they divide up very differently. Even sticking to epistemology, though, the distinction is shaky: for example, most of the Rationalists accepted that in practice we had to rely on the sciences for knowledge of the external world, and many of them were involved in scientific research; the Empiricists, on the other hand, generally accepted that a priori knowledge was possible in the fields of mathematics and logic.

This period also saw the birth of some of the classics of political thought, especially Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, and John Locke's Two Treatises of Government.

The seventeenth century in Europe saw the culmination of the slow process of detachment of philosophy from theology. Thus, while philosophers still talked about – and even offered arguments for the existence of – a deity, this was done in the service of philosophical argument and thought. (In the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, 18th-century philosophy was to go still further, leaving theology and religion behind altogether.)

List of seventeenth century philosophers

• Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715)
• Isaac Newton (1642–1727)
• Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716)
• Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)
• Damaris Cudworth Masham (1659–1708)
• Wang fu-zi (1619–1693)
• Huang Zongxi (1610-1695)
• Mary Astell (1666–1731)
• Mir Damad (d.1631)
• Mulla Sadra (1571–1640)

External links

• EMPHASIS: Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination Seminar

The Age of Enlightenment

was an eighteenth century movement in European and American philosophy, or the longer period including the Age of Reason. The term can more narrowly refer to the intellectual movement of The Enlightenment, which advocated Reason as the primary basis of authority. Developing in France, Britain and Germany, its sphere of influence also included Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Scandinavia, Spain and, in fact, the whole of Europe. Many of the United States' Founding Fathers were also heavily influenced by Enlightenment-era ideas, particularly in the religious sphere (Deism) and, in parallel with classical liberalism, in the political sphere (which had a major influence on its Bill of Rights, in parallel with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen).

The era is generally agreed to have ended around the year 1800 and the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars (1804-15).

History

The Enlightenment is often closely linked with the Scientific Revolution, for both movements emphasized reason, science, and rationality, while the former also sought their application in comprehension of divine or natural law. Inspired by the revolution of knowledge commenced by Galileo and Newton, and in a climate of increasing disaffection with repressive rule, Enlightenment thinkers believed that systematic thinking might be applied to all areas of human activity, carried into the governmental sphere in their explorations of the individual, society and the state. Its leaders believed they could lead their states to progress after a long period of tradition, irrationality, superstition, and tyranny which they imputed to the Middle Ages. The movement helped create the intellectual framework for the American and French Revolutions, Poland's Constitution of May 3, 1791, the Latin American independence movement, the Greek national independence movement and the later Balkan independence movements against the Ottoman Empire, and led to the rise of classical liberalism, democracy, and capitalism.

The Enlightenment is matched with the high baroque and classical eras in music, and the neo-classical period in the arts. It receives modern attention as a central model for many movements in the modern period. Another important movement in 18th century philosophy, closely related to it, focused on belief and piety. Some of its proponents, such as George Berkeley, attempted to demonstrate rationally the existence of a supreme being. Piety and belief in this period were integral to the exploration of natural philosophy and ethics, in addition to political theories of the age. However, prominent Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and David Hume questioned and attacked the existing institutions of both Church and State. The 19th century also saw a continued rise of empiricist ideas and their application to political economy, government and sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology.

The boundaries of the Enlightenment cover much of the seventeenth century as well, though others term the previous era the "Age of Reason." For the present purposes, these two eras are split; however, it is acceptable to think of them joined as one long period.

Europe had been ravaged by religious wars; when peace in the political situation had been restored, after the Peace of Westphalia and the English Civil War, an intellectual upheaval overturned the accepted belief that mysticism and revelation are the primary sources of knowledge and wisdom—which was blamed for fomenting political instability. Instead (according to those that split the two periods), the Age of Reason sought to establish axiomatic philosophy and absolutism as foundations for knowledge and stability. Epistemology, in the writings of Michel de Montaigne and René Descartes, was based on extreme skepticism and inquiry into the nature of "knowledge." The goal of a philosophy based on self-evident axioms reached its height with Baruch (Benedictus de) Spinoza's Ethics, which expounded a pantheistic view of the universe where God and Nature were one. This idea then became central to the Enlightenment from Newton through to Jefferson. The ideas of Pascal, Leibniz, Galileo and other philosophers of the previous period also contributed to and greatly influenced the Enlightenment; for instance, according to E. Cassirer, Leibniz’s treatise On Wisdom "... identified the central concept of the Enlightenment and sketched its theoretical programme" (Cassirer 1979: 121–23). There was a wave of change across European thinking, exemplified by Newton's natural philosophy, which combined mathematics of axiomatic proof with mechanics of physical observation, a coherent system of verifiable predictions, which set the tone for what followed Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in the century after.

The Age of Enlightenment is also prominent in the history of Judaism, perhaps because of its conjunction with increased social acceptance of Jews in some western European states, especially those who were not orthodox or who converted to the officially sanctioned version of Christianity.

Conflicts

As with theology, philosophy became a source of partisan debate, with different schools attempting to develop rationales for their viewpoints. Philosophers such as Spinoza searched for a metaphysics of ethics, which influenced pietism and the transcendental philosophy of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant.

Religion was linked to another concept which inspired a great amount of Enlightenment thought, namely the rise of the Nation-state. In the medieval and Renaissance periods, the state was restricted by the need to work through a host of intermediaries. This system existed because of poor communication, where localism thrived in return for loyalty to some central organization. Following improvements in transportation, organization, navigation and finally the influx of gold and silver from trade and conquest, however, the state assumed more authority and power. Intellectuals responded with a series of theories on the purpose and limit of state power. Throughout The Enlightenment, absolutism was therefore cemented. A string of philosophers (amongst them John Locke) reacted by advocating limitations on legitimate state power, influencing both Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The influence of these Enlightenment ideas extended to organizations seeking to affect state and social development and ultimately had a profound effect on the actions of politically active individuals worldwide.

Within the period of the Enlightenment, the question of what was the proper relationship of the citizen to the state continued to be explored. The idea that society is a contract between individual and some larger entity, whether society or state, was developed philosophically by a series of thinkers, including Rousseau, Montesquieu and Jefferson. Other thinkers, heralding romanticism, advocated the idea that nationality had a basis beyond mere preference. Philosophers such as Johann Gottfried von Herder expounded the idea that language had a decisive influence on cognition and thought, and that the meaning of a particular book or text was open to deeper exploration based on deeper connections, an idea now called hermeneutics. The two concepts -- of the contractual nature between the state and the citizen, and the reality of the nation beyond that contract -- had a decisive influence in the development of liberalism, democracy and constitutional government which followed.

At the same time, the integration of algebraic thinking, acquired from the Islamic world over the previous two centuries, and geometric thinking which had dominated Western mathematics and philosophy since at least Eudoxus, precipitated a scientific and mathematical revolution. Sir Isaac Newton's greatest claim to prominence came from a systematic application of algebra to geometry, and synthesizing a workable calculus which was applicable to scientific problems. The Enlightenment was a time when the solar system was truly discovered: with the accurate calculation of orbits, such as Halley's comet, the discovery of the first planet since antiquity, Uranus by William Herschel, and the calculation of the mass of the Sun using Newton's theory of universal gravitation. These series of discoveries had a momentous effect on both pragmatic commerce and philosophy. The excitement engendered by creating a new and orderly vision of the world, as well as the need for a philosophy of science which could encompass the new discoveries, greatly influenced both religious and secular ideas. If Newton could order the cosmos with natural philosophy, so, many argued, could political philosophy order the body politic.

Within the Enlightenment, two main theories contended to be the basis of that ordering: divine right and natural law. The writings of Jacques-Benigne Bossuet (1627-1704) set the paradigm for the divine right: that the universe was ordered by a reasonable God, and therefore his representative on earth had the powers of that God. The orderliness of the cosmos was seen as proof of God; therefore it was a proof of the power of monarchy. Natural law began, not as a reaction against divinity, but instead, as an abstraction: God did not rule arbitrarily, but through natural laws that he enacted on earth. Thomas Hobbes, though an absolutist in government, drew on this argument in Leviathan. Once the concept of natural law was invoked, however, it took on a life of its own. If natural law could be used to bolster the position of the monarchy, it could also be used to assert the rights of subjects of that monarch. If there were natural laws, then there were natural rights associated with them, just as there are rights under man-made laws.

What both theories had in common was the need for an orderly and comprehensible function of government. The "Enlightened Despotism" of, for example, Catherine the Great of Russia and Frederick the Great of Prussia, was not based on mystical appeals to authority, but on the pragmatic invocation of state power as necessary in order to hold back the anarchy of warfare and rebellion. Regularization and standardization were seen as good things because they allowed the state to reach its power outwards over the entirety of its domain and because they liberated people from being entangled in endless local custom. Additionally, they expanded the sphere of economic and social activity.

Thus rationalization, standardization and the search for fundamental unities occupied much of the Enlightenment and its arguments over proper methodology and nature of understanding. The culminating efforts of the Enlightenment include, amongst other things, the economics of Adam Smith, the physical chemistry of Antoine Lavoisier, the idea of evolution pursued by Johann Wolfgang Goethe and the declaration by Jefferson of inalienable rights. Development in the philosophy of the Enlightenment was also the basis for overthrowing the idea of a completely rational and comprehensible universe, and led, in turn, to the metaphysics of Hegel and Romanticism.

Influence

The Enlightenment occupies a central role in the justification for the movement known as modernism. The neo-classicizing trend in modernism came to see itself as a period of rationality which overturned established traditions, analogously to the Encyclopaediasts and other Enlightenment philosophers. A variety of 20th century movements, including liberalism and neo-classicism, traced their intellectual heritage back to the Enlightenment, and away from the purported emotionalism of the 19th century. Geometric order, rigor and reductionism were seen as Enlightenment virtues. The modern movement points to reductionism and rationality as crucial aspects of Enlightenment thinking, of which it is the heir, as opposed to irrationality and emotionalism. In this view, the Enlightenment represents the basis for modern ideas of liberalism against superstition and intolerance. Influential philosophers who have held this view include Jürgen Habermas and Isaiah Berlin.

This view asserts that the Enlightenment was the point when Europe broke through what historian Peter Gay calls "the sacred circle," whose dogma had circumscribed thinking. The Enlightenment is held to be the source of critical ideas, such as the centrality of freedom, democracy and reason as primary values of society. This view argues that the establishment of a contractual basis of rights would lead to the market mechanism and capitalism, the scientific method, religious tolerance, and the organization of states into self-governing republics through democratic means. In this view, the tendency of the philosophes in particular to apply rationality to every problem is considered the essential change. From this point on, thinkers and writers were held to be free to pursue the truth in whatever form, without the threat of sanction for violating established ideas.

With the end of the Second World War and the rise of post-modernity, these same features came to be regarded as liabilities - excessive specialization, failure to heed traditional wisdom or provide for unintended consequences, and the romanticization of Enlightenment figures - such as the Founding Fathers of the United States, prompted a backlash against both Science and Enlightenment based dogma in general. Philosophers such as Michel Foucault are often understood as arguing that the Age of Reason had to construct a vision of unreason as being demonic and subhuman, and therefore evil and befouling, whence by analogy to argue that rationalism in the modern period is, likewise, a construction. In their book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote a critique of what they perceived as the contradictions of Enlightenment thought: Enlightenment was seen as being at once liberatory and through the domination of instrumental rationality, tending towards totalitarianism.

Still yet, other leading intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky, see a natural evolution, using the term loosely, from early Enlightenment thinking to other forms of social analysis, specifically from The Enlightenment to liberalism, anarchism and socialism. The relationship between these different schools of thought, Chomsky and others point out Template:Fact, can be seen in the works of von Humboldt, Kropotkin, Bakunin and Marx, among others.

Important figures

• Baruch Spinoza (1632-1672) Dutch philosopher who is considered laying the groundwork for the 18th century Enlightenment.

• Balthasar Bekker (1634 - 1698) Dutch, a key figure in the Early Enlightenment. In his book De Philosophia Cartesiana (1668) Bekker argued that theology and philosophy each had their separate terrain and that Nature can no more be explained from Scripture than can theological truth be deduced from Nature.

• Robert Hooke (1635 - 1703) English, probably the leading experimenter of his age, Curator of Experiments for the Royal Society. Performed the work which quantified such concepts as Boyle's Law and the inverse-square nature of gravitation, father of the science of microscopy.

• Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783) French. Mathematician and physicist, one of the editors of Encyclopédie.

• Thomas Abbt (1738-1766) German. Promoted what would later be called Nationalism in Vom Tode für's Vaterland (On dying for one's nation).

• Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) French. Literary critic known for Nouvelles de la république des lettres and Dictionnaire historique et critique.

• G.L. Buffon (1707-1788) French. Author of L'Histoire Naturelle who considered Natural Selection and the similarities between humans and apes.

• James Burnett Lord Monboddo Scottish. Philosopher, jurist, pre-evolutionary thinker and contributor to linguistic evolution. See Scottish Enlightenment
• James Boswell (1740-1795) Scottish. Biographer of Samuel Johnson, helped established the norms for writing Biography in general.
• Edmund Burke (1729-1797) Irish. Parliamentarian and political philosopher, best known for pragmatism, considered important to both liberal and conservative thinking.
• Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) French. Philosopher, mathematician, and early political scientist who devised the concept of a Condorcet method.
• Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789) French. Author, encyclopaedist and Europe's first outspoken atheist. Roused much controversy over his criticism of religion as a whole in his work The System of Nature.
• Denis Diderot (1713-1784) French. Founder of the Encyclopédie, speculated on free will and attachment to material objects, contributed to the theory of literature.
• Ignacy Krasicki (1735-1801): Polish. Leading poet of the Polish Enlightenment, hailed by contemporaries as "the Prince of Poets." After the 1764 election of Stanisław August Poniatowski as King of Poland, Krasicki became the new King's confidant and chaplain. He participated in the King's famous "Thursday dinners" and co-founded the Monitor, the preeminent periodical of the Polish Enlightenment, sponsored by the King. Consecrated Bishop of Warmia in 1766, Krasicki thereby also became an ex-officio Senator of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. On Warmia's 1772 annexation by Frederick the Great's Prussia in the First Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Krasicki became a subject of the Prussian King and a habitué at the Prussian court. In 1795 Krasicki became Archbishop of Gniezno and thus Primate of Poland. He is remembered especially for his Fables and Parables.
• Benito Jerónimo Feijóo e Montenegro (1676-1764) was the most prominent promoter of the critical empiricist attitude at the dawn of the Spanish Enlightenment. See also Martín Sarmiento.
• Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) American. Statesman, scientist, political philosopher, pragmatic deist, author. As a philosopher known for his writings on nationality, economic matters, aphorisms published in Poor Richard's Alamanac and polemics in favour of American Independence. Involved with writing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1787.
• Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) English. Historian best known for his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
• Johann Gottfried von Herder German. Theologian and Linguist. Proposed that language determines thought, introduced concepts of ethnic study and nationalism, influential on later Romantic thinkers. Early supporter of democracy and republican self rule.
• David Hume Scottish. Historian, philosopher and economist. Best known for his empiricism and scientific scepticism, advanced doctrines of naturalism and material causes. Influenced Kant and Adam Smith.
• Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) German. Philosopher and physicist. Established critical philosophy on a systematic basis, proposed a material theory for the origin of the solar system, wrote on ethics and morals. Influenced by Hume and Isaac Newton. Important figure in German Idealism, and important to the work of Fichte and Hegel.
• Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) American. Statesman, political philosopher, educator, deist. As a philosopher best known for the United States Declaration of Independence (1776) and his interpretation of the United States Constitution (1787) which he pursued as president. Argued for natural rights as the basis of all states, argued that violation of these rights negates the contract which bind a people to their rulers and that therefore there is an inherent "Right to Revolution."
• Adam Weishaupt (1748-1830) German who founded the Order of the Illuminati.
• Hugo Kołłątaj (1750-1812) Polish. He was active in the Commission for National Education and the Society for Elementary Textbooks, and reformed the Kraków Academy, of which he was rector in 1783-86. An organizer of the townspeople's movement, in 1789 he edited a memorial from the cities. He co-authored the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's Constitution of May 3, 1791, and founded the Assembly of Friends of the Government Constitution to assist in the document's implementation. In 1791-92 he served as Crown Vice Chancellor. In 1794 he took part in the Kościuszko Uprising, co-authoring its Uprising Act (March 24, 1794) and Proclamation of Połaniec (May 7, 1794), heading the Supreme National Council's Treasury Department, and backing the Uprising's left, Jacobin wing.
• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) German. Dramatist, critic, political philosopher. Created theatre in the German language, began reappraisal of Shakespeare to being a central figure, and the importance of classical dramatic norms as being crucial to good dramatic writing, theorized that the centre of political and cultural life is the middle class.
• John Locke (1632-1704) English Philosopher. Important empiricist who expanded and extended the work of Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes. Seminal thinker in the realm of the relationship between the state and the individual, the contractual basis of the state and the rule of law. Argued for personal liberty with respect to property.
• Leandro Fernández de Moratín (1760-1828) Spanish. Dramatist and translator, support of republicanism and free thinking. Transitional figure to Romanticism.
• Montesquieu (1689-1755) French political thinker. He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, taken for granted in modern discussions of government and implemented in many constitutions all over the world.
• Nikolay Novikov (1744-1818) Russian. Philanthropist and journalist who sought to raise the culture of Russian readers and publicly argued with the Empress. See Russian Enlightenment for other prominent figures.
• Thomas Paine (1737-1809) English/American. Pamphleteer, Deist, and polemicist, most famous for Common Sense attacking England's domination of the colonies in America. The pamphlet was key in fomenting the American Revolution. Also wrote The Age of Reason which remains one of the most persuasive critiques of the Bible ever written.
• Francois Quesney (1694-1774) French economist of the Physiocratic school. He also practiced surgery.
• Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos. Main figure of the Spanish Enlightenment. Preeminent statesman.
• Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) Natural philosopher and theologian whose search for the operation of the soul in the body led him to construct a detailed metaphysical model for spiritual-natural causation.
• French Encyclopédistes
• Voltaire (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, essayist, deist and philosopher
• Leibniz
• Lord Monboddo
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau Political philosopher that wrote the Social Contract.
• Helvétius
• Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
• Olympe de Gouges
• Cesare Beccaria
• Adam Smith (1723-1790) Economist who wrote the Wealth of Nations
• Isaac Newton
• John Wilkes
• Antoine Lavoisier
• Mikhail Lomonosov
• Mikhailo Shcherbatov
• Ekaterina Dashkova
• Mary Wollstonecraft

See also

• Natural philosophy
• Humanism
• Secularism
• Infidels
• Higher criticism
• Deism
• Robert Boyle
• John Ruskin
• Counter-Enlightenment
• Intellectualism
• Anti-intellectualism
• Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
• The Select Society
• Christianity

Further reading

• Henry F. May The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976)
• Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Princeton University Press 1979
• Mark Hulluing Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes 1994
• Gay Peter. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996
• Michel Foucault, What is enlightenment?
• Redkop, Benjamin, The Enlightenment and Community, 1999
• Melamed, Yitzhak Y, Salomon Maimon and the Rise of Spinozism in German Idealism, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 42, Issue 1
• Porter, Roy The Enlightenment 1999
• Jacob, Margaret Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents 2000
• Thomas Munck Enlightenment: A Comparative Social History, 1721-1794
• Arthur Herman How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of how Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It 2001
• Stuart Brown ed., British Philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment 2002
• Alan Charles Kors, ed. Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. 4 volumes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003
• Buchan, James Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh's Moment of the Mind 2003
• Bernard Dieterle, Manfred Engel (ed.), The Dream and the Enlightenment / Le Rêve et les Lumières. Paris: Honoré Champion 2003, ISBN 2-7453-0672-3.
• Louis Dupre The Enlightenment & the Intellctural Foundations of Modern Culture 2004
• Himmelfarb, Gertrude The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, 2004
• Stephen Eric Bronner Interpreting the Enlightenment: Metaphysics, Critique, and Politics, 2004
• Jonathan Hill, Faith in the Age of Reason, Lion/Intervarsity Press 2004
• Stephen Eric Bronner The Great Divide: The Enlightenment and its Critics
• The London Philosophy Study Guide offers many suggestions on what to read, depending on the student's familiarity with the subject: Modern Philosophy

External links

• Dictionary of the History of Ideas: The Enlightenment
• Dictionary of the History of Ideas: The Counter-Enlightenment
• Introduction to the Enlightenment
• The greatest works of Enlightenment Literature
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