Seventeenth Century Enlightenment

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There are many engines of change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the seventeenth century, you have the influences of scientific discoveries, the ideas of the Enlightenment, the richness of art, and the development of the European state systems.
In the eighteenth century you find the crises of absolutism, the reforms of government, based on the new Enlightenment thinking, which resulted in both the American and French revolutions. For seventeenth century scientific discovers, you have several breakthroughs.
Most notable are Copernicus (1473-1543), the idea that the Earth rotates around the Sun, and Galileo (1564-1642), who applied scientific method to the motions of the planets like a modern scientist. These were some of …show more content…

The wider significance of the development of scientific thought was adapted by Rene Descartes (1596-1650) into The Principle of Doubt, which was his theory of knowledge, which is basically using the trial and error method to thinking in general. This laid the foundation for modern philosophy. After these developments, science became institutionalized. The art was baroque and realistic, casting off the bonds of the religious. The Palace of Versailles was built by Louis XIII and expanded by his son, Louis XIV (1643-1715), who was absolutist, meaning he believed the power of the monarch was unlimited. John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690) was written, detailing the state of nature and liberalism. The engines driving the seventeenth century led up to the factors that were to drive the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment thinkers caused there to be a crisis in the idea of the absolute monarch, in that now science had been discovered and along with, the powers of consciousness and thinking in the common man. So now wer have Enlightened Despots like Frederick the Great (1740-1786) in Prussia. Jacque Rousseau (1712-1778) in his book The Social Contract (1762) theorized about the best way to establish a political community in the face of the problems of commercial

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