What is the Age of Enlightenment?

Question: What is the Age of Enlightenment!?
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The Age of Enlightenment receives modern attention as a central model for many movements in the modern period!. Another important movement in 18th century philosophy, closely related to it, focused on belief and piety!. Some of its proponents, such as George Berkeley, attempted to demonstrate rationally the existence of a supreme being!. Piety and belief in this period were integral to the exploration of natural philosophy and ethics, in addition to political theories of the age!. However, prominent Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and David Hume questioned and attacked the existing institutions of both Church and State!. The 19th century also saw a continued rise of empiricist ideas and their application to political economy, government and sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology!.

The continent of Europe had been ravaged by religious wars in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries!. When political stability had been restored, notably after the Peace of Westphalia and the English Civil War, an intellectual upheaval overturned the accepted belief that mysticism and revelation are the primary sources of knowledge and wisdom!. Instead (according to scholars who split the two periods), the Age of Reason sought to establish axiomatic philosophy and absolutism as foundations for knowledge and stability!. Epistemology, in the writings of Michel de Montaigne and René Descartes, was based on extreme skepticism and inquiry into the nature of "knowledge!." The goal of a philosophy based on self-evident axioms reached its height with Baruch (Benedictus de) Spinoza's Ethics, which expounded a pantheistic view of the universe where God and Nature were one!. This idea then became central to the Enlightenment from Newton through to Jefferson!. The ideas of Pascal, Leibniz, Galileo and other natural philosophers of the previous period also contributed to and greatly influenced the Enlightenment!. Cassirer argued that Leibniz’s Treatise On Wisdom "identified the central concept of the Enlightenment and sketched its theoretical programme!."[5]!. There was a wave of change across European thinking, exemplified by Newton's natural philosophy, which combined mathematics of axiomatic proof with mechanics of physical observation, a coherent system of verifiable predictions, which set the tone for what followed Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in the century after!.

The Age of Enlightenment is also prominent in the history of Judaism, perhaps because of its conjunction with increased social acceptance of Jews in some western European states, especially those who were not orthodox or who converted to the officially sanctioned version of Christianity!.[6] Antisemitism, however, continued to remain a visible phenomenon throughout much of Europe during the Enlightenment, and a number of major Enlightenment figures were noted antisemites!.[7] The period is known as Haskalah in Jewish historiography, and the term carries the same connotations of "enlightenment" in Hebrew!.[8]

Many of the Founding Fathers of the United States were also influenced by Enlightenment-era ideas, particularly in the religious sphere (deism) and, in parallel with liberalism (which had a major influence on its Bill of Rights, in parallel with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen), socialism and anarchism in the political sphere!.

peace and loveWww@QuestionHome@Com

The Age of Enlightenment (French: Siècle des Lumières; Italian: Secolo dei Lumi, or Illuminismo; German: Zeitalter der Aufkl?rung; Spanish: Siglo de las Luces or Ilustración; Swedish: Upplysningen; Polish: O?wiecenie!.; Portuguese: Século das Luzes or Iluminismo) was an eighteenth-century movement in Western philosophy!. It was an age of optimism, tempered by the realistic recognition of the sad state of the human condition and the need for major reforms!. The Enlightenment was less a set of ideas than it was a set of attitudes!. At its core was a critical questioning of traditional institutions, customs, and morals!. Some classifications of this period also includes the late 17th century, which is typically known as the Age of Reason or Age of Rationalism!.[1]

The term "Age of Enlightenment" can more narrowly refer to the intellectual movement of The Enlightenment, which advocated reason as the primary basis of authority!. Developing in France, Britain and Germany, the Enlightenment influenced most of Europe, including Russia and Scandinavia!. The era is marked by such political changes as governmental consolidation, nation-creation, greater rights for common people, and a decline in the influence of authoritarian institutions such as the nobility and church!.

There is no consensus on when to date the start of the age of Enlightenment, and a number of scholars simply use the beginning of the eighteenth century or the middle of the seventeenth century as a default date!.[2] Many scholars use the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars (1804–15) as a convenient point in time with which to date the end of the Enlightenment!.[3] Still others capstone the Enlightenment with its beginning in Britain's Glorious Revolution of 1688 and its ending in the French Revolution of 1789!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

The age of Enlightenment wil arrive when we come from the heart, not from such issues as power or greed!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

It is a sad situation that in today's world humanity has retreated into a new dark age!. Religious intolerance that does not accept questioning and threatens physical annihilation of innocent people is something which should have disappeared centuries ago!.

Supposedly-religious followers who do not have the emotional fortitude to allow satirical cartoonists to express themselves in peace, are uncivilized!.

Truly civilized men can accept criticism and questioning and will defend the right to free speech in others (not allowing racism though)!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

If you can get a dictionary enlightenment is the same as information!.
And right now we are at the age of enlightenment!.!.!.

Age of Enlightenment is the age where we are beginning to understand more clearly what is happenning all around us, and we are learning more and deeper of what is life and what is everything!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

"The development from Aquinas through Locke and Newton represents more than four hundred years of stumbling, tortuous, prodigious effort to secularize the Western mind, i!.e!., to liberate man from the medieval shackles!. It was the buildup toward a climax: the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment!. For the first time in modern history, an authentic respect for reason became the mark of an entire culture; the trend that had been implicit in the centuries-long crusade of a handful of innovators now swept the West explicitly, reaching and inspiring educated men in every field!. Reason, for so long the wave of the future, had become the animating force of the present!."

"Confidence in the power of man replaced dependence on the grace of God—and that rare intellectual orientation emerged, the key to the Enlightenment approach in every branch of philosophy: secularism without skepticism!."
Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels, 100

See also
http://www!.ditext!.com/runes/e!.htmlWww@QuestionHome@Com