Le Siècle des Lumières (1650-1780s)

Timeline
Intellectual Movements
The Renaissance (1400-1600s)
The Scientific Revolution (1543-1687)
The Enlightenment (1650-1780s)
Industrial revolution (1760- 1820)

Religious Unrest
The Reformation
Protestantism: (Luther’s writings 1517–1521)
   Calvinism: (Jean Calvin 1530-1536)
English reformation (Henry VIII & the Church of England 1531 and 1539)
The Counter-Reformation (Council of Trent 1545-1563)
Index Librorum Prohibitorum enforced from the 1550s to 1948. Abolished in 1966.

The scientific revolution: “Early in the seventeenth century something new is already apparent in science. The changes which then manifested themselves meant that an intellectual barrier was crossed and the nature of civilization was altered for ever. There appeared in Europe a new attitude, deeply-utilitarian, encouraging men to invest time, energy and resources to master nature by systematic experiment […] Bacon advocated a study of nature based upon observation and induction and directed towards harnessing it for human purposes. ‘The true and lawful end of the sciences’, he wrote, ‘is that human life be enriched by new discoveries and powers.’” (Roberts 680)

“There was cultural and intellectual movement afoot in Europe that revolutionized the way learned men thought about their God, their government, and their place in the world. We know this period as the Enlightenment, the “Age of Reason.” Writers were no longer tethered to the strictures of either the church or the state. Their books addressed a wide range of previously banned topics, and readers waited eagerly for the volumes to come off the presses (Howard 108).

“The [Enlightenment] was animated at once by the scientific idea and by the social idea. It was an advance both in knowledge and in moral motive. […] Morality, positive law, social order, economics, the nature and limits of human knowledge, the constitution of the physical universe, had one by one disengaged themselves from theological explanations” (Morley 4).

“[T]he great central moral of it all was this: that human nature is good, that the world is capable of being made a desirable abiding-place, and that the evil of the world is the fruit of bad education and bad institutions” (Morley 5).

“The conviction that the character and lot of man are indefinitely modifiable for good was the indispensable antecedent to any general and energetic endeavor to modify the conditions that surround him. ” (Morley 4).

Some philosophers of importance
Francis Bacon (1562-1626)
René Descartes (1596-1650)
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632-1677)
John Locke (1632-1704) founder of the Enlightenment
Isaac Newton (1643-1727) Scientific revolution
Montesquieu (1689-1755)
Voltaire (1694-1778)
David Hume (1711-1776)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
Denis Diderot (1713-1784)
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)