THE ENLIGHTMENT
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
KIN 375 – Dr. D. Frankl
17th Century: A New Era of Scientific
Pursuit
• The 1700 are labeled as the
age of the enlightenment, a
time of culmination and a
new beginning. Old
institutionalized traditions
were rapidly making room to
new ways of thinking thus
setting the stage for massive
future change.
Diderot
17th Century: A New Era of
Scientific Pursuit
• 1543 Works by Archimedes recovered in
the West
• 17th Century scientists held that though
universe was made by God, it was
explicable by rational analysis
• emphasis on complex reasoning was
rejected in favor of a closer examination of
physical facts
http://www.angelfire.com/mo/christian22/history5.html
17th Century: A New Era of
Scientific Pursuit
• Scientific instruments made available with
the advancement of European technology
• Scientists rebelled against authority and
sough out new explanations of natural
phenomena. They focused on measurable
quantities and any relationships between
them.
http://www.angelfire.com/mo/christian22/history5.html
(Feb. 16, 2003)
17th Century: A New Era of
Scientific Pursuit
• Prince Federico
Cesi, founder of the
Accademia dei
Lincei, in 1611
suggested calling
this instrument
"telescopio"[from the
Greek tele (far) and
scopeo (I see)].
http://galileo.imss.firenze.it/news/cielimedicei/01/estrumento2.html
17th Century Personalities
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Descartes
Pascal
Bacon
Bayle
Newton
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Montesquieu
Voltaire
Diderot
Rousseau
Locke
René Descartes (1596-1650)
http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/descarte.htm
• One of the most
important Western
philosophers of the past
few centuries.
• Was just as famous as
an original physicist,
physiologist and
mathematician.
René Descartes
René Descartes (1596-1650)
• Educated from age 8 at a
Jesuit college.
• Studied classics, logic and
traditional Aristotelian
philosophy
• In 1618 he studied
mathematics and
mechanics under the
Dutch scientist Isaac
Beeckman.
René Descartes
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/
Mathematicians/Descartes.html
René Descartes (1596-1650)
• Descartes held the position that only
mathematics is certain and therefore all
knowledge must be based on mathematics.
• Falsely claimed no influence of others on his
work.
• Principia Philosophiae (1644) attempts to
place the whole universe on a mathematical
foundation reducing the study of the
universe to one of mechanics.
René Descartes (1596-1650)
http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/descarte.htm
• Descartes rejected the Aristotelian and
Scholastic traditions that had dominated
philosophical thought throughout the
Medieval period.
• In his revolutionary attempt to fully integrate
philosophy with the "new" sciences,
Descartes changed the relationship between
philosophy and theology.
René Descartes (Quotes)
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Quotations/Descartes.html
• Cogito Ergo Sum. "I think, therefore I
am.“ (Discours de la Méthode)
• “It is very certain that, when it is not in
our power to determine what is true, we
ought to act according to what is most
probable.” (Discours de la Méthode)
René Descartes (Quotes)
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Quotations/Descartes.html
• Perfect numbers like perfect men are
very rare. (Quoted in H. Eves Mathematical Circles Squared –
Boston, 1972).
• It is not enough to have a good mind.
The main thing is to use it well.
(Discours de la Méthode)
• If you would be a real seeker after truth,
you must at least once in your life doubt,
as far as possible, all things. (Discours de la
Méthode)
Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662)
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal
• A mathematician of the
first order, Pascal’s
treatise on the subject of
projective geometry and
contribution to probability
theory, has had a strong
influence on the
development of modern
economics and social
science.
Blaise Pascal
René Descartes
Blaise Pascal (Quotes)
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Pascal.html
• Our nature consists in movement; absolute
rest is death. -- Pensées (1670)
• It is the heart which perceives God and not
the reason. -- Pensées (1670)
• We arrive at truth, not by reason only, but
also by the heart. -- Pensées (1670)
René Descartes
• The more I see of men, the better I like my
dog. – H. Eves Return to Mathematical Circles
(Boston, 1988).
Blaise Pascal (Quotes)
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Pascal.html
• Let no one say that I have said nothing new...
the arrangement of the subject is new. When
we play tennis, we both play with the same
ball, but one of us places it better. -- Pensées
(1670)
• Reason is the slow and tortuous method by
which these who do not know the truth
discover it. The heart has its own reason which
reason does not know. -- Pensées (1670)
Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755)
http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/montesquieu/montesquieu-bio.html
• Born as Charles Louis de Secondat to a noble
and prosperous family.
• Studied science and history at the Oratorian
Collège de Juilly.
• Earned a law degree from the University of
Bordeaux in 1708
• Upon his death in 1716, Baron de Montesquieu,
left his fortune, his office as president of the
Bordeaux Parliament, and his title of Baron de
Montesquieu to his nephew de Secondat.
Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755)
http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/montesquieu/montesquieu-bio.html
• Montesquieu believed that a government that
was elected by the people was the best form of
government.
• His ideas about separation of powers became
the basis for the United States Constitution.
• Commerce, according to Montesquieu, is an
activity that cannot be confined or controlled by
any individual government or monarch.
Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/montesquieu/
• According to Montesquieu, the civil laws are
not an appropriate tool for enforcing religious
norms of conduct: God has His own laws, and
He is quite capable of enforcing them without
our assistance. When we attempt to enforce
God's laws for Him, or to cast ourselves as His
protectors, we make our religion an instrument
of fanaticism and oppression; this is a service
neither to God nor to our country.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
• The son of Nicolas Bacon, the Lord Keeper of
the Seal of Elisabeth I. Bacon described his
tutors at Trinity College Cambridge as "Men of
sharp wits, shut up in their cells of a few
authors, chiefly Aristotle, their Dictator." This is
likely the beginning of Bacon's rejection of
Aristotelianism and Scholasticism and the new
Renaissance Humanism.
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/
philosophers/bacon.html(2-16-03)
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
• Natural knowledge, according to Bacon, must
be reconceptualized as a cumulative process
of discovery, propelled by processing sensory
data about the external world through the
reasoning powers of the human brain.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/
is_5_108/ai_54830693
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
• “Books must follow
sciences, and not
sciences books.”
• “Knowledge is power”
• Reading maketh a full
man, conference a ready
man, and writing an exact
man.
• “Some books are to
be tasted, others to
be swallowed, and
some few to be
chewed and
digested.”
http://www.bartleby.com/100/139.html (2-16-03)
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
• “I had rather believe all
the fables in the legends
and the Talmud and the
Alcoran, than that this
universal frame is without
a mind.”
• “No pleasure is
comparable to the
standing upon the
vantage-ground of
truth.”
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/bacon/quotes.php
Voltaire’s View on the New Trends
• Man is the owner of his own mind
• Man is capable of goodness and progress
• One can uncover the reason behind events
and can explain the principles that govern
nature, man and society
• Questioning and criticism of authority
• broad solidarity of enlightened intellectuals
• Strong aversion toward nationalism
Source: http://mars.wnec.edu/~grempel/
courses/wc2/lectures/enlightenment.html (2-16-03)
Pierre Bayle (1647-1706)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bayle/
• A Huguenot, i.e., a French Protestant, who
spent almost the whole of his productive life
as a refugee in Holland.
• His volumes of works include history, literary
criticism, theology, obscenity, and much
more, in addition to philosophical treatments
of toleration, the problem of evil,
epistemological questions, and much more.
Pierre Bayle (1647-1706)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bayle
• Pierre Bayle was a progressive
Christian scholar who argued that
faith could not be justified by
reason, on the grounds that God is
incomprehensible to man.
• Although Bayle's intent was to turn
people against reason in matters of
faith, he was so thorough in
debunking the reasonableness and
coherency of religion that his works
subsequently influenced the
development of the Enlightenment
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(June 28, 1712 – July 2, 1778)
In his treatise "The Social Contract,"
Rousseau posits that man was naturally
good but is corrupted by the influence of
society and its institutions.
“Man is born free, and everywhere
he is in chains. “
“Everything is good as it leaves the
hands of the author of things,
everything degenerates in the
hands of man.”
Rousseau's influence both in art and
politics was huge in his own day and
continues to be strong today.
http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/rousseau/rousseau.html
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(June 28, 1712 – July 2, 1778)
• “All wickedness comes from weakness. . . . Make
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[the child] strong and he will be good.”
“The training of the body, though much neglected,
is… the most important part of education.”
“Childhood has its ways of seeing, thinking, and
feeling that are proper to it.”
“There is no original perversity in the human
heart.”
“Put questions within [the child's] reach and let
him solve them himself. Let him know nothing
because you have told him, but because he has
learned it for himself .”
• “It is in doing good that we become
good.”
Rousseau’s view on the relationship
between body and mind --
• “It is a lamentable mistake to imagine that
bodily activity hinders the working of the
mind, as if these two kinds of activity ought
not to advance hand in hand, and as if the
one were not intended to act as guide to the
other…to learn to think we must therefore
exercise our limbs, our senses, and our bodily
organs, which are tools of the intellect; and
to get the best use out of these tools, the
body which supplies us with them must be
strong and healthy.”
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
• “God and divine creation cannot be
part of any truly scientific theory
because both involve
"unconditioned" realities, while
science can only deal with
conditioned realities -- in the world,
everything affects everything else,
but the traditional view, found even
in Spinoza, is that God is free of any
external causal influences.”
http://www.friesian.com/kant.htm
by Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. (2000)
Kant's Categorical Imperative
The supreme principle of morality is a
categorical imperative since it is not
conditional upon one’s preferences.
Analytic propositions: propositions that are
true by definition, such as "All wives are
women."
Synthetic propositions: propositions that
are not true by definition, such as "Jones
is bald."
Kant's Categorical Imperative
The supreme principle of morality is a categorical
imperative since it is not conditional upon one’s
preferences.
A posteriori knowledge: knowledge attained
through the five senses, such as the fact that
the door is brown.
A priori knowledge: intuitive knowledge attained
without use of the senses, such as 2+2=4.
Kant's Categorical Imperative
• Kant presents the single categorical
imperative of morality: act only on that maxim
by which you can at the same time will that it
should become a universal law. Although
there is only one categorical imperative, Kant
argues that there can be four formulations of
this principle.
• Kant’s point is that the categorical imperative
involves a unique type of knowledge that is
intuitive, yet informative.
Kant's Categorical Imperative (b)
• The Formula of the Law of Nature: "Act
as if the maxim of your action were to
become through your will a universal
law of nature."
• The Formula of the End Itself: "Act in
such a way that you always treat
humanity, whether in your own person
or in the person of any other, never
simply as a means, but always at the
same time as an end."
Kant's Categorical Imperative (c)
• The Formula of Autonomy: "So act that your
will can regard itself at the same time as
making universal law through its maxims."
• The Formula of the Kingdom of Ends: "So act
as if you were through your maxims a lawmaking member of a kingdom of ends."