The Enlightenment Era artistic and philosophic identity. Review essay, an expression in artistic and philosophic identity. This title of our third segment is fairly dramatic and descriptive, which is what you will need to bring to this segment review project.
REASON AND REVOLUTION: This title of our third segment is fairly dramatic and descriptive, which is what you will need to bring to this segment review project. You will use this title as your guide and central theme in expressing your understanding of this segment.
The style of Rococo, The Art of Enlightenment, Neo-Classical style, and the period of Romanticism. These are the portions of the era, and you will address each as you put the era overall in perspective.
European politics, philosophy, science, and communications were radically reoriented during the course of the “long 18th century” (1685-1815) as part of a movement referred to by its participants as the Age of Reason, or simply the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers in Britain, France, and throughout Europe questioned traditional authority and embraced the notion that humanity could be improved through rational change.
The Enlightenment produced numerous books, essays, inventions, scientific discoveries, laws, wars, and revolutions. The American and French Revolutions were directly inspired by Enlightenment ideals and respectively marked the peak of its influence and the beginning of its decline. The Enlightenment ultimately gave way to 19th-century Romanticism.
The Enlightenment’s important 17th-century precursors included the Englishmen Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, the Frenchman René Descartes, and the key natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution, including Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Its roots are usually traced to 1680s England, wherein the span of three years Isaac Newton published his “Principia Mathematica” (1686) and John Locke his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (1689)—two works that provided the scientific, mathematical, and philosophical toolkit for the Enlightenment’s major advances.
The format and requirements: This presentation’s structure should begin with an opening paragraph to set up the basics of your overall concept. Then, express what you can recall as essential material that defines each of the four main periods of this segment, mentioned above. Identify the period, then define and describe the historical and artistic character of that period, making use of particular examples of art, artist, and relevant socio-philosophy to support your concept of essential material. Close with your favorite aspects of both the Baroque and Enlightenment eras.
The heart of the eighteenth century Enlightenment is the loosely organized activity of prominent French thinkers of the mid-decades of the eighteenth century, the so-called “philosophes”(e.g., Voltaire, D’Alembert, Diderot, Montesquieu). The philosophes constituted an informal society of men of letters who collaborated on a loosely defined project of Enlightenment exemplified by the project of the Encyclopedia (see below 1.5). However, there are noteworthy centers of Enlightenment outside of France as well.
There is a renowned Scottish Enlightenment (key figures are Frances Hutcheson, Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Reid), a German Enlightenment (die Aufklärung, key figures of which include Christian Wolff, Moses Mendelssohn, G.E. Lessing and Immanuel Kant), and there are also other hubs of Enlightenment and Enlightenment thinkers scattered throughout Europe and America in the eighteenth century.
What makes for the unity of such tremendously diverse thinkers under the label of “Enlightenment”? For the purposes of this entry, the Enlightenment is conceived broadly. D’Alembert, a leading figure of the French Enlightenment, characterizes his eighteenth century, in the midst of it, as “the century of philosophy par excellence”, because of the tremendous intellectual and scientific progress of the age, but also because of the expectation of the age that philosophy (in the broad sense of the time, which includes the natural and social sciences)
The dramatic success of the new science in explaining the natural world promotes philosophy from a handmaiden of theology, constrained by its purposes and methods, to an independent force with the power and authority to challenge the old and construct the new, in the realms both of theory and practice, on the basis of its own principles.
Taking as the core of the Enlightenment the aspiration for intellectual progress, and the belief in the power of such progress to improve human society and individual lives, this entry includes descriptions of relevant aspects of the thought of earlier thinkers, such as Hobbes, Locke, Descartes, Bayle, Leibniz, and Spinoza, thinkers whose contributions are indispensable to understanding the eighteenth century as “the century of philosophy par excellence”.
The Enlightenment is often associated with its political revolutions and ideals, especially the French Revolution of 1789. The energy created and expressed by the intellectual foment of Enlightenment thinkers contributes to the growing wave of social unrest in France in the eighteenth century. The social unrest comes to a head in the violent political upheaval which sweeps away the traditionally and hierarchically structured ancien régime (the monarchy, the privileges of the nobility, the political power of the Catholic Church).
The French revolutionaries meant to establish in place of the ancien régime a new reason-based order instituting the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality. Though the Enlightenment, as a diverse intellectual and social movement, has no definite end, the devolution of the French Revolution into the Terror in the 1790s, corresponding, as it roughly does, with the end of the eighteenth century and the rise of opposed movements, such as Romanticism, can serve as a convenient marker of the end of the Enlightenment, conceived as an historical period.