Philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment

During the eighteenth century, ideas of reform started in France and spread through Europe. This period is referred to as The Age of Enlightenment. The Enlightenment carried the idea that economic change and political reform were possible. People started to think that they could use their own intellect to challenge the intellectual authority of tradition and the Christian past. The people who wrote for change and reform were called the philosophes (French for philosophers). They wrote hoping to bring reform to religion, political thought, society, government, and the economy. Thanks to the print culture, the philosophes’ ideas were spread throughout Europe. People started to have educated conversations about these new ideas in places like coffeehouses and drinking spots. The ideas of philosophes during the Enlightenment challenged whole societies. Some of philosophes include Denis Diderot, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire.

In the mid eighteenth century, the Encyclopedia was published. It was written under the leadership of Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert. Over one hundred French thinkers contributed to the Encyclopedia, including all of the major French philosophes. Diderot wrote on about every subject including philosophy, science, music, and art. D’Alembert divided and described the different sciences, and he analyzed the role of reason. The Encyclopedia was meant to secularize learning and to refute intellectual assumptions from the Middle Ages. It contained articles on religion, government, and philosophy. It attempted to see the natural world through science and technology, and human passions through an understanding of how individuals and societies work. The Encyclopedia helped spread the thoughts of the Enlightenment over the continent.

Immanuel Kant was an important German philosopher who coined the term the “Enlightenment.” He said, “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance” (Kant). His greatest works were The Critique of Pure Reason, and The Critique of Practical Reason. “He sought to accept the rationalism of the Enlightenment and still to preserve a belief in human freedom, immortality, and the existence of God” (Kagan, 687). Kant did not think that the human mind j...

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...e itself” (Richter, 109).

During his lifetime, Voltaire wrote over two thousand books and pamphlets, and wrote for the Encyclopedia. He was one of the first philosophers in the Enlightenment, and some of his ideas lead to the French Revolution.

Denis Diderot, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire all helped to write about possible reform for society. They all challenged the established society. They all believed that society could be perfected a bit at a time.

Work Cited

Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment. New York: Norton, 1969.

Kant, Immanuel. “What Is Enlightenment?” trans. by Peter Gay, in Introduction to Contemporary Civilzation in the West, 2nd ed., Vol. 2 New York: Columbia University Press, 1954, pp. 1071-1072.

Kagan, Donald and Ozment, Steven and Turner, Frank. The Western Heritage: Volume Two: Since 1648, 8th ed., New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 2004.

Montesquieu. The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent. New York: MacMillan, 1949.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract and Discourses. trans. by G.D.H. Cole. New York: Dutton, 1950.

Richter, Peyton and Ricardo, Ilona. Voltaire. Boston: Twayne, 1980.