Metaphysical Thoughts During the Enlightenment Period
The eighteenth century was fraught with change. Dryden, Pope and Johnson were dominating the literature. Fahrenheit was building his first mercury thermometer. The Boston Tea Party and the French Revolution occurred. However, some of the most drastic changes occurred in thought. Prior to the eighteenth century, thinkers such as Locke, Spinoza, Descartes, and Hobbes dominated Western thought to the extent that they changed the way people viewed the world. Consequently, much of the eighteenth century philosophy, as well as the general thought, was a product of these precursors. Either in replying to them, or as a direct consequence of their ideas, the eighteenth century responded to these great thinkers.
The first philosophical movement responding to the thinkers of the 17th century that will be discussed is the rationalist movement. It is generally known to be started by Descartes in the 17th century, while the torch was carried by Spinoza and then Leibniz up until his death in 1716. Two things distinguished the rationalists from their empiricist counterparts. The rationalists believed that foundational concepts of reality were found in reason, not experience. These foundational concepts are called innate ideas, and from these innate ideas the rationalists believed that one could deduce truth, much in the way geometrical proofs are thought out.
An easy illustration of how the rationalists use causality as a tool to derive metaphysical truths is by using it as a starting point. By using the principle that every event has a cause, it appears that certain metaphysical truths may be uncovered. For example, Descartes uses causality as a proof for God's existen...
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...too, do the characters in the play, believing that reality is the same as they perceive it. They also believe in Cartesian dualism, since they carry the classical theistic conception of God. If they are truly Christian in faith, they have to believe that the soul is separate from the body, or their beliefs become contradictory.
Works Cited
“Hume, David.” The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. 10th ed. 1995.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Cambridge: Library of Congress, 1996.
McGreal, Ian P. Great Thinkers of the Western World. New York, NY: Harper, 1992.
Nolan, Lawrence, "Descartes' Ontological Argument", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 15 November 2003. (Summer 2001 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),URL=<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2001/entries /descartes-ontological/>.
Enlightenment thinkers, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and Nicolas de Condorcet were influenced by teachings of the Scientific Revolution. Reason and logic were used to dissect what was good and valuable apart from what was tyrannical and unable to be proven from the old teachings of philosophers and religion. It was this process of reason and logic that gave these thinkers the confidence in man’s intelligence and potential to improve that showed up in their writings.
During the eighteenth century, ideas of reform started in France and spread through Europe. This period is referred to as The Age of Enlightenment. The Enlightenment carried the idea that economic change and political reform were possible. People started to think that they could use their own intellect to challenge the intellectual authority of tradition and the Christian past. The people who wrote for change and reform were called the philosophes (French for philosophers). They wrote hoping to bring reform to religion, political thought, society, government, and the economy. Thanks to the print culture, the philosophes’ ideas were spread throughout Europe. People started to have educated conversations about these new ideas in places like coffeehouses and drinking spots. The ideas of philosophes during the Enlightenment challenged whole societies. Some of philosophes include Denis Diderot, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire.
The Enlightenment of the 18th century evolved due to the many changes brought about by the Scientific Revolution. With all of the new scientific discoveries, new thought processes were developed. The scientists of the Scientific Revolution brought about revolutionary change. These scientists inspired the philosophes of the Enlightenment to challenge the ways of the "Old Regime" and question the ideas of the church. Philosophers such as Francois Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Locke published their controversial ideas and these ideas along with some important political action, helped to mold a new type of society. The new society was one that tolerated different religious beliefs. "The minds of men, abandoning the old disciplines and contentions of theology, turned to what they called "natural philosophy," namely, the faith in individual reason rather than in divine revelation; they welcomed the excitement offered by the ever widening opportunities for discovery and commerce and by the prospect of immeasurable progress owing to the inventions of science and technology and the spread of education."1 Religious toleration during the Age of Enlightenment was ultimately affected by changes in the Roman Catholic Church, the politics of the 18th century, and the philosophy movement.
The Enlightenment of the 18th century was an exciting period of history. For the first time since ancient Grecian times, reason and logic became center in the thoughts of most of elite society. The urge to discover and to understand replaced religion as the major motivational ideal of the age, and the upper class social scene all over Europe was alive with livid debate on these new ideas.
... place, organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) started up, signifying how the African Americans were tired of being `stepped on' and how they fought against lynching and discrimination against African Americans; mainly due to the actions of the Ku Klux Klan.
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The Scientific Revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries changed the way people viewed the world. Scientific philosophers, such as Galileo and Descartes, rejected the old teachings of the church and introduced new ways of thinking. These men sought to prove that rational thought could demonstrate the existence of God. They also argued that understanding a series of rational thoughts, rather than faith, would lead to an understanding of how the world worked. Traditional ways of thinking were ultimately challenged by logical and sensible reasoning.
In chapter ten, The Enlightenment: A Worldview in Action, Wells discuss how the Enlightenment was a positive movement for history. The Enlightenment was a time of new ideas of viewing the world. People began to see it in mechanical term and mathematical language. Through these terms, people were allowed to know and explain the workings of the world, and soon, rationalism was developed. Wells describes rationalism as a worldview based on science. This way of thinking start to develop in the seventeenth century with the Scientific Revolution; however, it didn’t take off into the eighteenth century with the Enlightenment. Many of the Enlightenment thinkers were inspired by the Scientific Revolutionary thinkers. For example, John Locke
The stance of the American government was crucial to the involvement of the United States in the Korean War and greatly influenced the outcome. After World War II, in August of 1945, the Soviet Union raided the Northern part of Korea, which at the time Japan had control over, with the plan of spreading communism. In response, the United States sent their troops to the Southern part of Korea in order to protect them against a Soviet Union takeover. This created a divide along the 38th parallel with the North supported by the Soviet Union and the South supported by the United States (“U.S. Enters the Korean Conflict”). However, this temporary solution was repealed on June 25, 1950 when North Korea crossed the 38th parallel and attacked South Korea, thus starting the Korean War (“Us Enters the Korean
This essay will explore parallels between the ideas of the scientific revolution and the enlightenment. The scientific revolution describes a time when great changes occurred in the way the universe was viewed, d through the advances of sciences during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The enlightenment refers to a movement that grew out of the new scientific ideas of the revolution that occurred in the late seventeenth to eighteenth century. Although both the scientific revolution and enlightenment encapsulate different ideas, the scientific revolution laid the underlying ideological foundations for the enlightenment movement. A number of parallels exist between the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment; there was a decrease in the belief in authority, there was an increased belief in Darwinism, The importance of science grew as beneficial to society, the ideas of society as better off without scientific and knowledge. The parallels between the scientific revolution and the enlightenment will be explored throughout this essay.
[Rechtin 1997] Eberhardt Rechtin and Mark W. Maier. The Art of Systems Architecting. CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida, 1997. Web 17 March 2012
Wolf, Abraham. History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century. New York: MacMillan Press, 1968. Web. 5 June 2012.
As part of developing the need in the initial investigation step in the systems development life cycles (SDLC) process, a constructive method is use case. Use case is a technique for capturing requirements with written scenarios in non-technical terminology that describe how a system interacts with a user or another system (University of Phoenix, Course Syllabus, 2006). There are two fundamental pieces, along with how they relate, to bear in mind: the actors and the goals. The actors are everyone and everything that will use (or be used) by the project progress reports, and the goals, which are what the actors want to achieve. The use case will describe the goals achieved by the actors who perform tasks (Carr & Meehan, 2005).
What is Enlightenment? The Enlightenment literally means “time of illumination". It is commonly used to denote the Age of Enlightenment, "mankind's final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error." The era was given this name, because it was a time when a group of influential scholars, writers, artists, and scientists actively sought to use the ability of reasoning. A primary cause of the enlightenment period was the scientific revolution. The scientific revolution was the advance in physics, mathematics, and human anatomy. It caused a shift in views towards nature and society, and introduced new ideas and theories. The scientific method was applied in order to discover the laws of nature, and new inventions such as the microscope and the thermometer were created. Also, the properties of gravity and electricity were discovered. During this period in history, things like superstition and religion were replaced with questions and reason. Some notable developments during the scientific revolution include Copernicus’ advance in the heliocentric theory, or the theory that all planets revolved around the sun, Galileo’s invention of the telescope, and Descartes’ use of the scientific method.