Tell me about Enlightenment
What is Enlightenment ?
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We use enlighten as a verb meaning to clear up, to remove confusion. Light is also a powerful metaphor for spiritual insight. If you have a great revelation about the divinity of the world, you could say you have been enlightened. The era known as the "Age of Reason" is also called the Enlightenment.
Answer:
Enlightenment
European history
WRITTEN BY
Brian Duignan
Brian Duignan is a senior editor at Encyclopædia Britannica. His subject areas include philosophy, law, social science, politics, political theory, and religion.
See Article History
Alternative Titles: Age of Reason, Aufklärung, siècle de Lumières
Enlightenment, French siècle des Lumières (literally “century of the Enlightened”), German Aufklärung, a European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which ideas concerning God, reason, nature, and humanity were synthesized into a worldview that gained wide assent in the West and that instigated revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, and politics. Central to Enlightenment thought were the use and celebration of reason, the power by which humans understand the universe and improve their own condition. The goals of rational humanity were considered to be knowledge, freedom, and happiness.
Enlightenment
QUICK FACTS
DATE
c. 1601 - c. 1800
LOCATION
Europe
CAUSES
Renaissance humanism, which rediscovered Classical literature and culture
Methods and ways of thinking developed during the scientific revolution of the 15th through 17th centuries
The Reformation and its undermining of the Roman Catholic Church's authority
OUTCOMES
The belief that human history is a record of progress
The emergence of Romanticism in the late 18th century
The first modern secularized theories of psychology and ethics
The idea of society as a social contract
The understanding of the universe as a mechanism governed by discoverable laws
The use and celebration of reason
KEY PEOPLE
Francis Bacon
Jeremy Bentham
Wojciech Bogusławski
Bernard Le Bovier, sieur de Fontenelle
Immanuel Kant
John Locke
Montesquieu
Friedrich Nicolai
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Voltaire
RELATED TOPICS
The arts
Philosophy
Reason
A brief treatment of the Enlightenment follows. For full treatment, see Europe, history of: The Enlightenment.
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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 but subordinated it to spiritual revelation and the revealed truths of Christianity.