The Enlightenment has its roots in a European intellectual and scholarly movement known asRenaissance humanismand was also preceded by the Scientific Revolution and the work of Francis Bacon, among others. What happened before the Enlightenment period?
What is Enlightenment? Philosopher Immanuel Kant asked the self-same question in his essay of the same name. In the end, he came to the conclusion: “Dare to know! Have courage to use your own reason!” This was an immensely radical statement for this time period. Previously, ideas like...
and only the pedant will protest. When Gibbon wrote of both the establishment of Christianity by Constantine and the rise of Islam as revolutions, he was generalizing two unique events. Modern historians do the same when they write of the English, French,...
WHAT WAS ENLIGHTENMENT? Print Cite Email Text size:A A So perhaps it is from the operatic masterpieces of the age that we can best learn an important lesson: it is a considerable distortion of the way things were to describe the so-called Enlightenment exclusively as an “age of reason”...
However, as more and more people became involved in the excitement surrounding tea, the purity of the original concept was lost, and for a period the tea ceremony became corrupted, boisterous and highly embellished. Efforts were then made to return to the earlier simplicity, with the result ...
is thus the motto of enlightenment.It is because of laziness and cowardice that so great a part of humankind, after nature has long since emancipated them from other people’s direction (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless gladly remains minors for life, and that it becomes so easy for other...
Just over two hundred years ago, the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, wrote an essay entitled 'Was ist Aufklrung?' ('What is Enlightenment?'). For Kant, enlightenment was man's final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error....
Many things in our experience convince us that the historical event of the Enlightenment did not make us mature adults, and we have not reached that stage yet. However, it seems to me that a meaning can be attributed to that critical interrogation on the present and on ourselves which Kant...
Second Intermediate PeriodThe Second Intermediate Period was a period of about 212 years in Egyptian history. More specifically, it began in 1782 BC with the fall of the Middle Kingdom and ended in 1570 BC with the rise of the New Kingdom. This period is marked by political instability and...
and that it was through science and technology that this battle was supposed to be won. In addition to creating new nautical and cartographic tools, the Enlightenment was also itself a process of orientation that situated the West as the center of this transformation, the source of its universal...