17th-century philosophy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
17th-century philosophy in the Western world is generally regarded as being the
start of modern philosophy, and a departure from the medieval approach,
especially Scholasticism.
Early 17th-century philosophy is often called the Age of Reason or Age of
Rationalism and is considered to succeed the Renaissance philosophy era and
precede the Age of Enlightenment.
In his famous 1784 essay "What Is Enlightenment?", Immanuel Kant defined it as
follows:
The Enlightenment began then, from the belief in a rational, orderly and
comprehensible universe—then proceeded, in stages, to form a rational and
orderly organization of knowledge and the state, such as what is found in the
idea of Deism. This began from the assertion that law governed both heavenly and
human affairs, and that law invested the king with his power, rather than the
king's power giving force to law. The conception of law as a relationship
between individuals, rather than families, came to the fore, and with it the
increasing focus on individual liberty as a fundamental right of man, given by
"Nature and Nature's God,"
www.martinfrost.ws/htmlfiles/enlightenment_age.html
The Enlightenment idea of rationality as a guiding force for government found
its way to the heart of the American Declaration of Independence, and the
Jacobin program of the French Revolution, as well as the American Constitution
of 1787 and the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791.
Age of Enlightenment
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Age of Enlightenment (or simply the Enlightenment) is the era in Western
philosophy, intellectual, scientific and cultural life, centered upon the 18th
century, in which reason was advocated as the primary source for legitimacy and
authority. It is also known as the Age of Reason.[1] The enlightenment was a
movement of science and reason.
Developing simultaneously in France, Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands,
Italy, Spain, Portugal and the American colonies, the movement culminated in the
Atlantic Revolutions, especially the success of the American Revolution, when
breaking free of the British Empire. The authors of the American Declaration of
Independence, the United States Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of the
Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and the Polish-Lithuanian Constitution of May
3, 1791, were motivated by Enlightenment principles.[2]
The Age of Reason;
Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology is a deistic pamphlet,
written by eighteenth-century British radical and American revolutionary Thomas
Paine, that criticizes institutionalized religion and challenges the legitimacy
of the Bible, the central sacred text of Christianity. Published in three parts
in 1794, 1795, and 1807, it was a bestseller in the United States, where it
caused a short-lived deistic revival. British audiences, however, fearing
increased political radicalism as a result of the French Revolution, received it
with more hostility. The Age of Reason presents common deistic arguments; for
example, it highlights what Paine saw as corruption of the Christian Church and
criticizes its efforts to acquire political power. Paine advocates reason in the
place of revelation, leading him to reject miracles and to view the Bible as an
ordinary piece of literature rather than as a divinely inspired text. It
promotes natural religion and argues for the existence of a creator-God.
Wiki: Historical definitions of race
During the Age of Enlightenment, Europeans tried to define race as a biological
concept, in keeping with their scientific ideas
Wiki: Modernity (1/2)
See also: Modernism and Modern Age
Modernity typically refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical
period, in particular, one marked by the move from feudalism (or agrarianism)
toward capitalism, industrialization, secularization, rationalization, the
nation-state and its constituent institutions and forms of surveillance (Barker
2005, 444). Conceptually, modernity relates to the modern era and to modernism,
but forms a distinct concept. Whereas the Enlightenment invokes a specific
movement in Western philosophy, modernity tends only to refer to the social
relations associated with the rise of capitalism. Nevertheless modernity may
characterise tendencies in intellectual culture: particularly, those movements
intertwined with secularisation and post-industrial life, such as Marxism and
existentialism, as well as the formal establishment of social science. In
context, modernity has been associated with cultural and intellectual movements
occurring between 1436 and 1789, and extending to the 1970s or later (Toulmin
1992, 3-5).
It [racism] originates from a mind-set that regards "them" as different from
"us" in ways that are permanent and unbridgeable.... In all manifestations of
racism from the mildest to the most severe, what is being denied is the
possibility that the racializers and the racialized can coexist in the same
society, except perhaps on the basis of domination and subordination.
Racism: coded as culture?(Racism: A Short History by George M. Fredrickson)-
Publication: The Nation
Publication Date: 28-OCT-02
For Fredrickson, racism includes both idea and act. It occurs where stereotypes
about irreversible racial differences mandate injustice. As he observes, "My
theory or conception of racism, therefore, has two components: difference and
power." What limits his theoretical account of racism are the terms "permanent"
and "unbridgeable." These characteristics implicitly distinguish racism from the
many forms of ethnic and religious prejudice that assign a more flexible role to
race. They also set up Fredrickson's historical narrative, which amounts to a
practical definition of racism. In order to show us when racism began, he has to
show us what is racism, and what is not.
Fredrickson locates the origins of racism in the late Middle Ages and
early-modern period, putting himself into a kind of centrist position--twice.
Whereas quite a few historians of anti-Semitism believe that racist
anti-Semitism emerged as something fundamentally new in the nineteenth century,
Fredrickson sees "proto-racist" anti-Semitism in certain late-medieval Spanish
attitudes. According to them, Jews could never become Christian; "permanent"
differences separated Jews from, and made them enemies of, Christianity. Second,
unlike some historians of the early slave trade and the first phases of
colonization, Fredrickson thinks it is inaccurate to call these fateful
undertakings "racist." Here too proto-racism existed; yet during the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, slavery and colonialism were not supported by an
ideology grounded in "unbridgeable" racial differences. Witness, for example,
the famous debate between Juan Gines de Sepulveda and Bartolome de Las Casas. In
1550 Las Casas argued that because Indians had reason, they could be converted
to Christianity and become "peaceful" subjects of the Spanish crown. Degrading
them with slave labor was therefore wrong. Tellingly, Las Casas's views, which
the Catholic Church endorsed, became official policy. Europeans continued to
enslave Africans and Indians, but for the most part they did so without an
explicitly racist justification. That came later--in the Age of Enlightenment.
Fredrickson frequently directs our attention to a depressing paradox: "The
scientific thought of the Enlightenment was a precondition for the growth of a
modern racism based on physical typology." Consider that Johann Blumenbach's
"authoritative" physical typology, On the Natural Varieties of Mankind, appeared
in 1776, or at the very height of the Enlightenment.So, not only did the
Enlightenment make modern biological racism possible, it made this nastiness
necessary--it pushed racists into dehumanizing the objects of their biases. And
they did that, working mainly in the burgeoning discourse of pseudoscience.
The Age of Enlightenment
www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Age_of_Enlightenment
Enlightenment thinkers reduced religion to those essentials which could only be
"rationally" defended, i.e., certain basic moral principles and a few
universally held beliefs about God. Aside from these universal principles and
beliefs, religions in their particularity were largely banished from the public
square. Taken to its logical extreme, the Enlightenment resulted in atheism.
The age of Enlightenment is considered to have ended with the French Revolution,
which had a violent aspect that discredited it in the eyes of many. Also,
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who referred to Sapere aude! (Dare to know!) as the
motto of the Enlightenment, ended up criticizing the Enlightenment confidence on
the power of reason. Romanticism, with its emphasis upon imagination,
spontaneity, and passion, emerged also as a reaction against the dry
intellectualism of rationalists. Criticism of the Enlightenment has expressed
itself in a variety of forms, such as religious conservatism, postmodernism, and
feminism.
The legacy of the Enlightenment has been of enormous consequence for the modern
world. The general decline of the church, the growth of secular humanism and
political and economic liberalism, the belief in progress, and the development
of science are among its fruits. Its political thought developed by Thomas
Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704), Voltaire (1694-1778) and Rousseau
(1712-1788) created the modern world. It helped create the intellectual
framework not only for the American Revolutionary War and liberalism, democracy
and capitalism but also the French Revolution, racism, nationalism, secularism,
fascism and communism.
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