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First Essay
Name: Nikita Mikhelasvili
Date:
March 19, 2021
What are the historical roots of the Enlightenment? Describe its rise and explain how it
transformed the Western Civilization?
Fundamentally, enlightenment refers to an intellectual European movement which existed
between 17
th
and 18
th
centuries. The movement synthesized different critical ideas such as ideas
related to God, nature, reason and humanity. The thoughts behind enlightenment were
concentrated on the use and celebration of reasoning. Reasoning was considered as the power of
the human beings to understand the universe and ways to improve their own condition. Besides,
the main objective of the rational humanity for the movement was based on freedom, happiness
and knowledge (
Outram, 2019).
The roots of the enlightenment were some of the reasons which largely contributed to
existence of the intellectual movement in Europe. Basically, there were three main historical
roots of the enlightenment. The humanism of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the
Protestant Reformation. The humanism of the renaissance was an intellectual movement
motivated by the scholars and civil leaders. The humanism was development to respond to the
medieval scholastic conventions in education which existence in the time. The movement mainly
insisted on scientific studies, practicals and the pre-professional for only men.
Secondly, the scientific revolution which was a recurrence of events which marked the
development of the modern science during the early modern period. This is the time when the
development of the science related subjects such as mathematics. Astronomy, biology chemistry
among others transformed how the society viewed the nature. The existence of the revolution
largely influenced the enlightenment intellectual social movement.
Finally, the protestant reformation which was majorly a religious and political movement
and splintered the catholic Europe. This created a structures and beliefs which were used to
define the region in modern era. Reformers such as martin Luther and others questioned more
about the catholic religious leadership and execution of the religious activities. This movement
initiated the need for splitting to Protestants. Such reform contributed to the existence of
enlightenment (
Curran, 2018).
The rise of the enlightenment was due to its core principles which the movement was
based on. The movement emphasized on the need to reason over superstition or science over a
blind faith. The movement mainly used the power of the press to rise as well as other
enlightenment thinkers questioned the knowledge which was accepted. This created questions
and doubt in everything and people were able to create an open mind to reason out.
Enlightenment was considered as the turning point of the western civilization which was
considered as an era or age of light replacing the age of darkness (
Hunter & Wootton, 2017).
References
Curran, M. (2018).
Atheism, religion and enlightenment in pre-revolutionary Europe
. Boydell &
Brewer Ltd.
Hunter, M., & Wootton, D. (2017).
Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment
. Oxford
University Press.
Outram, D. (2019).
The enlightenment
. Cambridge University Press.
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