The Enlightenment

Paper Summary:

This paper relates that the Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth century in Europe and North America. The author relates that a group of writers, philosophers, and scientists started to apply the principles of science, empiricism, and rationalism to religious, social, political, and economic issues. The paper explains that intellectuals of Enlightenment advocated that unassisted human reason, instead of faith or tradition, was the guiding principle that applied to, not just natural sciences, but to all human conduct, including politics.

From the Paper:

"Apart from Aristotle who first applied the principles of "empiricism" to knowledge, Copernicus (1473-1543), Galileo (1564-1642) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626), made significant contributions to revolutionary "paradigm" changes in human scientific thought. However, when Isaac Newton (1642-1727) published his monumental Principia Mathematica in 1687, it became the precursor of the Enlightenment movement proper. Newton argued that the universe could be explained completely with mathematics. The universe operated in a completely rational and predictable way. There is no need for applying divine religion or theology to explain any aspect of the physical phenomena of the universe and that all planets and objects in the universe moved due to a physical attraction between them called gravity."

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