Summary of Anthony Pagden's The Enlightenment

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#1 The American society that was growing in the mid-1800s was the result of a European historical process that had begun in the sixteenth century, when religious reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin had subjected some of the dogmas of the ancient faith to individual reason.

#2 Tocqueville was writing about a century that had produced two great and very different revolutions: the American and the French. Between them, they had transformed the world. Every century, at its midpoint, attempts to throw off all that it has accumulated hitherto.

#3 The Enlightenment was a revolution that had effectively unseated all religion and replaced it with rationalist philosophy. It was a constant process that could never be completed, but what all those involved were certain of was that it could not now be reversed.

#4 The Enlightenment, which was the reordering of all modes of knowledge from astronomy to moral philosophy, was not the creation of only two men: Bacon and Descartes. It was the work of many others, including the Italian physicist Galileo Galilei, the French astronomer and mathematician Pierre Gassendi, Newton, and the philosophers John Locke and Thomas Hobbes.

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E-book: 29 kwietnia 2022