Ch 18 ID's 15-32
Terms
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- Baron De Montesquieu
- French aristocrat who wanted to limit royal absolutism; Wrote The Spirit of Laws, urging that power be separated between executive, legislative, and judicial branches, each balancing out the others, thus preventing despotism and preserving freedom. This greatly influenced writers of the US Constitution. He greatly admired British form of government.
- Madame du Chatelet
- a French noblewoman who became important to mathematics as the translator of Newton's Principia.
- John Locke
- Wrote Two Treatises on Government as justification of Glorious Revolution and end of absolutism in England. He argued that man is born good and has rights to life, liberty, and property. To protect these rights, people enter social contract to create government with limited powers. If a government did not protect these rights or exceeded its authority, Locke believed the people have the right to revolt. The ideas of consent of the governed, social contract, and right of revolution influenced the United States Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. He also laid the foundations for criticism of absolute monarchy in France.
- Voltaire
- Greatest of enlightened philosophers; He was educated by Jesuits, and came to challenge Catholic Church. He believed in distant deistic God - a clockmaker who built an orderly world and let in run under laws of science. He hated religious intolerance and felt that religion suppressed human spirit. He wrote Candide against evils of organized religion. He argued for religious toleration in Treatise on Toleration. His deism was intended to construct a more natural religion based on reason and natural law. He was imprisoned in the Bastille for 11 months in 1717. Then he was exiled in England for 3 years, when he came to admire their system of government and advocated freedom of thought and respect for all. Lived on the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia from 1743, where he supporter Enlightened Despotism.
- Tabla Rasa
- blank slate John Locke proposed
- Bernard De Fontentelle
- a French mathematician who wrote on the history of mathematics and the philosophy of mathematics ; made science apeal to the masses with his witty " Conversations on the Plurality of Two Worlds; skeptical of absolute truth (religion)
- philosophes
- Thinkers of the Enlightenment; Wanted to educate the socially elite, but not the masses; were not allowed to openly criticize church or state, so used satire and double-meaning in their writings to avoid being banned; Salons held by wealthy women also kept philosophes safe; They considered themselves part of an intellectual community, and wrote back and forth to each other to share ideas.
- Pierre Bayle
- wrote Historical and Critical Dictionary examining religious beliefs and persecutions of the past. He found that human beliefs were very varied and often wrong. He concluded that nothing can ever be known beyond all doubt, and that one's best hope was open-minded toleration. This skepticism was very influential. His Dictionary was the most popular book in private French libraries at that time.
- Enlightenment
- a movement in the 18th century that advocated the use of reason in the reappraisal of accepted ideas and social institutions
- Jean le Rond d'Alembert
- a French mathematician who was a pioneer in the study of differential equations and their use of in physics. He studied the equilibrium and motion of fluids.