Enlightenment

Major Representative Philosophers: Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Olympe de Gouge



Classification: Rationalism


Meaning: Rationalism is the belief in human reason. Kant was both a rationalist and an empiricist (belief in the human senses).




Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire: proposed the Seven Points of the French Enlightenment. They opposed authority because they thought that everyone should find their own answers to philosophical questions. They had strong faith in human reason. They believed in education because they thought that poverty was caused by ignorance. They believed in cultural optimism, which is the belief that humanity would improve once reason and knowledge were widespread. They wanted everyone to return back to nature, or a simpler life. They thought it was “irrational to imagine a world without God.” They felt that human rights were freedom of the press, freedom of the speech, and abolition of slavery.


Olympe de Gouge: demanded equal rights for men and women.

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant: combined the beliefs of the rationalists and empiricists by stating that while our knowledge of the world comes from our sensation, reason helps us to determine how we perceive the world around us. He believed that “time and space are two forms of intuition.” He believed in the law of causality because we perceive everything as a matter of cause and effect. We can’t know what the world is like; we can only know what the world is like for us. He felt that all human beings always look for the cause of every event. He believed that two elements contribute to our knowledge of the world, material of knowledge (external conditions) and form of knowledge (internal conditions). He believed that the answers to the big philosophical questions are unknowable because we have never experienced them, but it is in human nature to ask these questions. He says that for every philosophical question, there are two contrasting viewpoints that are equally reasonable. However, we can assume that God exists because of faith, not reason. We cannot comprehend ourselves or the universe. He felt that the difference between right and wrong was a matter of reason and innate. He believed that our moral code is that we shouldn’t do anything that we wouldn’t want others to do to us, and that we should not exploit people. Goodwill determines whether an action was morally right. When we follow our “practical reason”, we make moral choices, and we exercise our free will because it is we who make the moral law that we conform to.