Suchergebnisse
Suchergebnisse:
enlightened despotism during the 1960s and 1970s was, in one sense, a comment on this historiography of the Enlightenment. But the last generation has seen a transformation in the way the Enlightenment is studied and this has contributed to the return of enlightened despotism to favour.
- Overview
- The age of reason: human understanding of the universe
Historians place the Enlightenment in Europe (with a strong emphasis on France) during the late 17th and the 18th centuries, or, more comprehensively, between the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and the French Revolution of 1789. It represents a phase in the intellectual history of Europe and also programs of reform, inspired by a belief in the possibility of a better world, that outlined specific targets for criticism and programs of action.
What led to the Enlightenment?
The roots of the Enlightenment can be found in the humanism of the Renaissance, with its emphasis on the study of Classical literature. The Protestant Reformation, with its antipathy toward received religious dogma, was another precursor. Perhaps the most important sources of what became the Enlightenment were the complementary rational and empirical methods of discovering truth that were introduced by the scientific revolution.
Renaissance
Learn more about the Renaissance.
Reformation
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.
Britannica Quiz
European History
5. Apr. 2021 · A major engine of Enlightenment studies at Oxford since the 1970s has been the Voltaire Foundation, a unique institution that is currently being transformed into a full-scale, international research hub in the field.
1. Okt. 2019 · Such an essentialist approach was abandoned by J. G. A. Pocock, a member of the Cambridge School of Intellectual History during the 1960s and 1970s. In his works on the history of early modern political philosophy, he defended the view that one should differentiate between different forms of Enlightenment in different European countries.
- Leo Catana
- 2019
26. Sept. 2017 · From the 1970s to the 1990s, scholars such as Horst Möller, Werner Schneiders and Rudolf Vierhaus extended the range of authors, topics and positions considered as part of the Enlightenment.
Together with Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality (1950) and fellow Frankfurt School member Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1964), it has had a major effect on 20th-century philosophy, sociology, culture, and politics, especially inspiring the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s.
1. März 2020 · First Online: 01 March 2020. 355 Accesses. Abstract. Of all the theoretical positions that arose from the 1970s left-wing academic upsurge, none caused more debate than postmodernism. The liquidation of tragedy confirms the abolition of the individual. Horkheimer and Adorno. Download chapter PDF.
