What did Voltaire believe in?Question:What did Voltaire believe in?Who Was Voltaire?Fran?ois-Marie Arouet, commonly known as Voltaire, was a famous French Enlightenment philosopher who lived between 1694-1778. Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire tended to emphasize reason, humanism, skepticism...
During the Enlightenment, European philosophers began to think in new ways about how the world worked and what role humans played in the development of society. Before the seventeenth century, most Europeans had believed in a world created and governed by a divine authority, but many began to ...
Truth be told, nobody really understands all the factors that can help facilitate enlightenment. If they did, we would all be enlightened by now. Moreover, many of the states taken to be "enlightened" are actually states of the subtle or causal realm. That is, they are extraordinary experi...
Enlightened rationality—A way of thinking based on the belief that all real knowledge is arrived at through using logic and that human behaviour should be based on this form of abstract reasoning. It is derived from the principles of the scientific method often attributed to the ‘Enlightenment’...
Philosophy, on the other hand, has a long history of examining the self. In the East we have theUpanishads, theTao te Ching, and the teachings of Gautama Buddha. In the West, we have Plato, followed by pre-Enlightenment religious philosophers who were concerned with the sinful qualities of...
The theory of limited government can be traced back to the Enlightenment philosophers of the 17th century, but the idea itself is much older. It is also associated with thefree marketandclassical liberalism, although politicians and economists differ on the exact limitations that a government should...
“the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” while popularized by Bentham, can be traced back to the philosopherFrancis Hutcheson, a founding father of the Scottish Enlightenment (Reeves). One root of utilitarianism isEpicurus. Bentham claimed inspiration from Hume. When he came across Hume’...
The Enlightenment gave rise to some of history’s most famous political philosophers.One of the most important questions of the era was the divine right of kings: were kings necessary?Were they empowered by God? According to Hobbes and Locke, no. Hobbes argued that society needed a strong cen...
Silly question. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini create the idea that natural selection is a fine-grained discriminatory enterprise that distinguishes among all the properties philosophers can discover (or invent?) precisely so they can demolish it. The authors’ error is to note correctly that there...
Locke was influenced by the Enlightenment and earlier philosophers like John Milton and Hugo Grotius. 5 What is the significance of Locke's "tabula rasa" theory? It suggests that all knowledge comes from experience, contrasting with the notion of innate ideas. 4 Did Thomas Hobbes believe in the...