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The Age of Enlightenment was a broad philosophical movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The traditional theological-political system that placed Scripture at the center, with religious authorities and monarchies claiming and enforcing their power by divine right, was challenged and overturned in the realm of ideas.
Broadly speaking, Enlightenment science greatly valued empiricism and rational thought and was embedded with the Enlightenment ideal of advancement and progress. The study of science, under the heading of natural philosophy , was divided into physics and a conglomerate grouping of chemistry and natural history , which included anatomy , biology ...
John Locke's portrait by Godfrey Kneller, National Portrait Gallery, London. John Locke (/ l ɒ k /; 29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704 ()) [13] was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of the Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "father of liberalism".
Both the moderate Enlightenment and a radical or revolutionary Enlightenment were reactions against the authoritarianism, irrationality, and obscurantism of the established churches. Philosophers such as Voltaire depicted organized religion as hostile to the development of reason and the progress of science and incapable of verification.
The philosophes (French for 'philosophers') were the intellectuals of the 18th-century European Enlightenment. [1] Few were primarily philosophers; rather, philosophes were public intellectuals who applied reason to the study of many areas of learning, including philosophy, history, science, politics, economics and social issues.
Through this accumulation and sharing of knowledge he believed it was possible for anybody to comprehend all the known facts of the natural world. The enlightenment of the natural world spurred the desire for enlightenment of the social and political world. Condorcet believed that there was no definition of the perfect human existence and thus ...
Scottish Enlightenment thinkers developed what leading thinkers such as James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714–99) and Lord Kames called a science of man, [58] which was expressed historically in the work of thinkers such as James Burnett, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, William Robertson and John Walker, all of whom merged a scientific study of how ...
Enlightenment thinkers advanced ideals of political pluralism and empirical inquiry, which, together with the Industrial Revolution, transformed Western society. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the influence of Enlightenment rationalism continued with the rise of secularism and liberal democracy , while the Industrial Revolution fueled economic ...