Lumières

It included philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, John Locke, Edward Gibbon, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Pierre Bayle and Isaac Newton.

This movement is influenced by the Scientific Revolution in southern Europe arising directly from the Italian Renaissance with people like Galileo Galilei.

[Note 1] Members of the movement saw themselves as a progressive élite, and battled against religious and political persecution, fighting against what they saw as the irrationality, arbitrariness, obscurantism and superstition of the previous centuries.

[2] Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646 – 1716) and Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727) had independently and almost simultaneously developed the calculus, and René Descartes (1596 – 1650) the idea of monads.

British philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and David Hume adopted an approach, later called empiricism, which preferred the use of the senses and experience over that of pure reason.

[3] But he demurred from Descartes in Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione ("On the Improvement of the Understanding"), where he argued that the process of perception is not one of pure reason, but also the senses and intuition.

On one side, religious philosophy concentrated on piety, and the omniscience and ultimately mysterious nature of God; on the other were ideas such as deism, underpinned by the impression that the world was comprehensible by human reason and that it was governed by universal physical laws.

God was imagined as a "Great Watchmaker"; experimental natural philosophers found the world to be more and more ordered, even as machines and measuring instruments became ever more sophisticated and precise.

There developed the philosophical notion of the thoughtful subject, an individual who could make decisions based on pure reason and no longer in the yoke of custom.

Hobbes, who lived for three quarters of the 17th century, had worked to create an ontology of human emotions, ultimately trying to make order out of an inherently chaotic universe.

Ce qu’on nous dit dans la dernière renverse toutes les idées des premières.Today we receive three different, conflicting, educations: those of our fathers, those of our masters, and those of the world.

It is only when we know the last that we can reject the first two.The ideal figure of the Lumières was a philosopher, a man of letters with a social function of exercising his reason in all domains to guide his and others' conscience, to advocate a value system and use it in discussing the problems of the time.

Despite controversy about the limits of their philosophy,[8][9] especially when they denounced black slavery, many Lumières criticised slavery, or colonialism, or both, including Montesquieu in De l'Esprit des Lois (while keeping a "personal" slave), Denis Diderot in Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, Voltaire in Candide and Guillaume-Thomas Raynal in his encyclopaedic Histoire des deux Indes, the very model of 18th-century anticolonialism to which, among others, Diderot and d’Holbach contributed.

Anticlericism was not the only source of tension in France: some noblemen contested monarchical power and the upper classes wanted to see greater fruit from their labours.

[13] According to the Lumières philosophers,[14] the crucial point of intellectual progress consisted of the synthesis of knowledge, enlightened by human reason, with the creation of a sovereign moral authority.

Great thinkers at the end of the Lumières movement (Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and even the young Goethe) adopted into their philosophy the ideas of self-organising and evolutionary forces.

Claude Nicolas Ledoux (1736 – 1806) was a member of the Académie d'Architecture was without doubt the architect whose projects best represented the utopian, purely rational environment.

There was considerable coverage in the English and French Press, but less so in Germany and Italy; in Spain and Russia very few knew about it save a few intellectuals, senior officials and grand families participated in the movement.

The philosophers of the Lumières movement[Note 1] came with many different talents: Thomas Jefferson had had a legal education but was equally at home with archaeology and architecture; Benjamin Franklin had been a career diplomat and was a physicist.

The social origins of the philosophers were also diverse: many were from middle-class families (Voltaire, Jefferson), others from more modest beginnings (Immanuel Kant, Franklin, Diderot) or from the nobility (Montesquieu, Condorcet).

In 1774, Thomas Jefferson wrote a report on behalf of the Virginia delegates to the First Continental Congress, which was convened to discuss the grievances of Great Britain's American colonies.

This social mixing was particularly prominent in 18th-century France, in the "États Généraux de l’esprit humain" ("General States of Human Spirit") where the Lumières philosophy flourished.

Some cultured women were treated as equal to the men on questions of religion, politics and science, and could bring a certain stylishness to debate, for example the contributions of Anne Dacier to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, and the works of Émilie du Châtelet.

All learned societies functioned as open salons and formed provincial, national and Europe-wide networks, exchanging books and letters, welcoming visiting members, and launching research and teaching programmes in subjects such as physics, chemistry, mineralogy, agronomy, and demography.

By cataloguing books and with subscriptions to learned societies, a public far from the centre of political activity could keep up with new ideas, discoveries and debates every month, if not every day.

Thomas Jefferson, a cultured and learned man and one of the original planters of the State of Virginia, was well known to the English philosopher John Locke, and the Genevan Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

In the summer of 1784, he travelled to Europe to take over the duties of Benjamin Franklin as Ambassador of the United States to France, and during this time he met many of the Lumières, becoming a frequent visitor to literary salons and bookshops in Paris.

The 1787 United States Constitution restates Montesquieu's principle of the separation of powers into legislative, executive and judicial branches, which together form the foundations of modern democracy.

As the philosophy took hold in the salons, the cafés and the clubs, the absolute rule of the monarch disintegrated, in part because of opposition by the French nobility[28] who saw no future for themselves in reform.

But most of the French philosophers died before seeing their seedlings planted during the Revolution bear fruit, with the exception of Nicolas de Condorcet, Louis Sébastien Mercier and Abbé Raynal.