How Did The Scientific Revolution Influence The Enlightenment

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Research Question To what degree did the Scientific Revolution influence the ideas and philosophies of the Enlightenment? The ideas and philosophies of the European Enlightenment from 1685 to 1815 were greatly influenced by the Scientific Revolution. And the Scientific Revolution played a big role in the development of the Enlightenment. The Scientific Revolution was a very significant event in European history and pretty relevant to our world today. It grew in popularity throughout Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries and it represented a fundamental shift in the way people understood the natural world. The most important figures of the Scientific Revolution were Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton. They all developed new …show more content…

Moreover, the Enlightenment embodied a growing confidence in the powers of human reason to grasp the natural and social world. This was very much linked with the scientific advances of the past century, where the human mind had shown its ability to uncover the laws and principles governing the universe. It was René Descartes and Immanuel Kant who set up rigorously rationalist frameworks that came to put reason at the heart of human exploration and choice. Immanuel Kant, for example, often said that reason is there to enable humans to transcend the narrowness associated with their senses and to find truths about the world a priori, truths that would otherwise be universal. Enlightenment thinkers, in addition, really were borrowing the vision of the Scientific Revolution: the universe reigns by natural laws comprehensible and manageable by a systematic application of human reason (A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, Pierre-Simon Laplace). Philosophers such as the Marquis de Condorcet and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot maintained that social and political problems would be susceptible to solutions compliant to progressive betterment through reason and scientific laws. This,

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