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* [http://www.pinellasfla.com/litenlightenment.htm The greatest works of Enlightenment Literature]
* [http://www.pinellasfla.com/litenlightenment.htm The greatest works of Enlightenment Literature]
* {{fr}}{{cite news | title='L'esprit des Lumières a encore beaucoup à faire dans le monde d'aujourd'hui' by [[Tzvetan Todorov]] | publisher=Le Monde | date=March 4, 2006 | url=http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3246,36-747585@51-696669,0.html}}
* {{fr}}{{cite news | title='L'esprit des Lumières a encore beaucoup à faire dans le monde d'aujourd'hui' by [[Tzvetan Todorov]] | publisher=Le Monde | date=March 4, 2006 | url=http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3246,36-747585@51-696669,0.html}}
==In the [[18th century]] the philosophies of [[The Enlightenment]] began to have a dramatic effect, the landmark works of philosophers such as [[Immanuel Kant]] and [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]] influencing a new generation of thinkers. In the late 18th century a movement known as [[Romanticism]] sought to combine the formal rationality of the past, with a greater and more immediate emotional and organic sense of the world. Key ideas that sparked this change were [[evolution]], as postulated by [[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]], [[Erasmus Darwin]], and [[Charles Darwin]] and what might now be called [[emergent]] order, such as the [[free market]] of Adam Smith. Pressures for egalitarianism, and more rapid change culminated in a period of revolution and turbulence that would see philosophy change as well.
== Brief historical outline ==
With the tumultuous years of 1789-1815, European culture was transformed by revolution, war and disruption. By ending many of the social and cultural props of the previous century, the stage was set for dramatic economic and political change. European philosophy participated in, and drove, many of these changes.
=== Influences from the late Enlightenment ===
The last third of the 18th century produced a host of ideas and works which would both systematize previous philosophy, and present a deep challenge to the basis of how philosophy had been systematized. [[Immanuel Kant]] is a name that most would mention as being among the most important of influences, as is [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]]. While both of these philosophers were products of the 18th century and its assumptions, they pressed at the boundaries. In trying to explain the nature of the state and government, Rousseau would challenge the basis of government with his declaration that "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains". Kant, while attempting to preserve axiomic skepticism, was forced to argue that we do not see reality, nor do we speak of it, only how it appears to us.
== Philosophical schools and tendencies ==
This is by no means an exhaustive list of all '''19th-century philosophy'''.
===German idealism===
One of the first philosophers to attempt to grapple with Kant's philosophy was [[Johann Gottlieb Fichte]], whose working out of Kantian metaphysics included incorporation of what would become the major movement in European arts and letters for the next 50 years, [[Romanticism]]. In Fichte's ''Wissenschaftslehre'', he argues that the self posits itself and is a self-producing and changing process.
[[Schelling]], [[Hegel]]. Bauer, Stirner
[[Arthur Schopenhauer]], rejecting Hegel, called for a return to Kantian idealism.
===Utilitarianism===
In early 19th century [[United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland|Britain]], [[Jeremy Bentham]] and [[John Stuart Mill]] promoted the idea that actions are right as they maximize pleasure and minimize pain.
===Marxism===
[[Ludwig Feuerbach]]. [[Karl Marx]] and [[Friedrich Engels]].
===Kierkegaard and Nietzsche===
[[Existentialism]] as a philosophical movement is properly a [[20th-century philosophy|20th-century]] movement, but its major antecedents, [[Søren Kierkegaard]] and [[Friedrich Nietzsche]] wrote long before the rise of existentialism. In the [[1840]]s, academic philosophy in [[Europe]], following Hegel, was almost completely divorced from the concerns of individual human life, in favour of pursuing abstract metaphysical systems. Kierkegaard sought to reintroduce to philosophy, in the spirit of [[Socrates]]: subjectivity, commitment, faith, and passion, all of which are a part of the human condition.
Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche saw the moral values of 19th-century Europe disintegrating into [[nihilism]] (Kierkegaard called it the ''levelling'' process). Nietzsche attempted to undermine traditional moral values by exposing its foundations. To that end, he distinguished between [[master-slave morality|master and slave moralities]], and claimed that man must turn from the meekness and humility of Europe's slave-morality.
Both philosophers are precursors to existentialism, among other ideas, for their importance on the "great man" against the age. Kierkegaard wrote of 19th-century Europe, "Each age has its own characteristic depravity. Ours is perhaps not pleasure or indulgence or sensuality, but rather a dissolute pantheistic contempt for the individual man."<ref>Kierkegaard, Søren. ''Concluding Unscientific Postscript''</ref>
===Positivism===
[[Auguste Comte]], the self-professed founder of modern [[sociology]], put forward the view that the rigourous ordering of confirmable observations alone ought to constitute the realm of human knowledge. He had hoped to order the sciences in increasing degrees of complexity from mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and a new discipline called "sociology", which is the study of the "dynamics and statics of society".<ref>Comte, Auguste. ''Course on Positive Philosophy''</ref>
===Pragmatism (Pragmaticism)===
The American philosophers [[C.S. Peirce]] and [[William James]] developed the pragmatist philosophy in the late 19th century.
===British idealism===
The twilight years of the 19th-century in [[United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland|Britain]] saw the rise of [[British idealism]], a revival of interest in the works of Kant and Hegel.
== Further reading ==
* Baird, Forrest E. ''Philosophic Classics: 19th Century Philosophy''. ISBN 0130485500
* Gardiner, Patrick. {ed.} ''19th-century Philosophy''. ISBN 9780029112205
* Shand, John. ''Central Works of Philosophy''. Vol. 3. The Nineteenth Century. ISBN 9780773530539
== See also ==
* [[List of philosophers born in the nineteenth century]]
== External links ==
*[http://www.iep.utm.edu/f/fichtejg.htm Fichte from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
[[Category: General Reference]]
[[Category: General Reference]]
[[Category: Modern Philosophy]]
[[Category: Modern Philosophy]]
