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The Enlightenment: Turn Of The Seventeenth Century

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The Enlightenment is an intellectual movement that occurred around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe. This movement placed emphasis on reason and individualism rather than tradition, creating an era where the people pushed themselves away from ancient authority. The Enlightenment caused many people to become skeptical of the teachings of the church, to begin to want to understand the physical world through reason alone and to discover the natural laws which governed the people. It pushed people to want to discover knowledge through experience rather than accepting the traditions and opinions they have acquired as they grew up prior to that era. The Enlightenment helped people to discover that they are able to form their own opinions without relying on religious or royal authority to shape how they …show more content…

The deductive method entailed finding an irrefutable, self-evident principle then deducing other truths from it through a chain of logical reasoning. He believed mathematics were the key to understanding the truths of nature and the moral underlying human existence. He called for individuals to question and possibly overthrow all traditional beliefs. His beliefs convinced people that they have the capacity to comprehend the world through their own mental powers. The Enlightenment originated from the Scientific Revolution. Philosophes would take the ideas of previous philosophers, disprove them, and replace the former “truths” with ideas they have formulated through their discoveries. The philosophes of the Enlightenment era wanted to leave behind the superstitions and ignorance that prevailed throughout that time to create a more rational and human society. They wished to break away from the beliefs that could not be explained by reason or common sense and seek knowledge that could be gained from reason and experience

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