Age of Enlightenment

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, 17th century philosophy, 19th century philosophy, 20th century philosophy, A. Owen Aldridge, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, Adam Weishaupt, Age of Reason, Alan Charles Kors, Alexis de Tocqueville, American Declaration of Independence, American Enlightenment, American Revolution, American War of Independence, Ancient philosophy, Antoine Lavoisier, Antonio de Ulloa, Atheism, Atheist, Atlantic Revolutions, Augustin Barruel, Authority, Balthasar Bekker, Baron d'Holbach, Baruch Spinoza, Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro, Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, Benjamin Franklin, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Binomial nomenclature, Biography, Boyle's Law, Café Procope, Camille Desmoulins, Capitalism, Carl Linnaeus, Cesare, Marquis of Beccaria, Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Chinese philosophy, Christian Wolff (philosopher), Christian philosophy, Civil liberties, Classical liberalism, Claude Adrien Helvétius, Coffeehouse, Commission for National Education, Common Sense (pamphlet), Condorcet, Conservatism, Constitution of May 3, 1791, Contemporary philosophy, Counter-Enlightenment, Criminal law, Critical philosophy, Critical thinking, D'Alembert, D'Alembert's, D’Alembert, Daniel Roche, David Hume, Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Deism, Democracy, Denis Diderot, Diafotismos, Dictionnaire philosophique, Diderot, Dimitrie Cantemir, Discourse on the Method, Dositej Obradović, Eastern philosophy, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, Ekaterina Dashkova, Emanuel Swedenborg, Empiricism, Encyclopédie, Encyclopaedist, English coffeehouses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English language, Enlightened absolutism, Ernst Cassirer, Essayist, Europe, Evolution, Experimental philosophy, Fables and Parables, Fichte, François-Marie Arouet, François Quesnay, France, Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli, Francois Quesney, Free market, Free will, Freedom (political), Freemasonry, French Classicism, French Encyclopédistes, French Revolution, Friedrich von Schiller, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, George Berkeley, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de 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Papers, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Spectator, The System of Nature, The Tatler, The Wealth of Nations, Theory of Moral Sentiments, Thirteen Colonies, Thomas Abbt, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Thomas Reid, Thursday dinners, Tolerance, United States Bill of Rights, United States Constitution, United States Declaration of Independence, Voltaire, Weimar Classicism, Western culture, Western philosophy, Western world, What is Enlightenment?, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,

17th century philosophy in the Western world is generally regarded as being the start of modern philosophy, and a departure from the medieval approach, especially Scholasticism.

19th century philosophy

In the 19th century the philosophies of The Enlightenment began to have a dramatic effect, the landmark works of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau influencing a new generation of thinkers. In the late 18th century a movement known as Romanticism sought to combine the formal rationality of the past, with a greater and more immediate emotional and organic sense of the world. Key ideas that sparked this change were evolution, as postulated by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Erasmus Darwin, and Charles Darwin and what might now be called emergent order, such as the free market of Adam Smith. Pressures for egalitarianism, and more rapid change culminated in a period of revolution and turbulence that would see philosophy change as well.

20th century philosophy

The 20th century brought with it the end of the modern era in philosophy and the initiation of contemporary philosophy. This new era in philosophy saw the professionalization of the discipline, the development of a deep divide between philosophers who labeled themselves “analytic” and philosophers who labeled themselves "continental", as well as the first substantial contributions of the United States to philosophy.

A. Owen Aldridge

A. Owen Aldridge (1915 -2005) was a Professor of French and Comparative Literature, founder-editor of the journal Comparative Literature Studies, and author of books on a wide range of literature studies.

Adam Ferguson

Adam Ferguson, also known as Ferguson of Raith (20 June 1723 (O.S.) (July 1, N.S.) - 22 February 1816) was a philosopher and historian of the Scottish Enlightenment. He is sometimes called "the father of modern sociology."^[1]

Adam Smith

Adam Smith (baptised 16 June 1723 – 17 July 1790 [OS: 5 June 1723 – 17 July 1790]) was a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The latter, usually abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics. Adam Smith is widely cited as the father of modern economics.^[1][2]

Adam Weishaupt

Johann Adam Weishaupt (February 6, 1748 in Ingolstadt – November 18, 1830^[1][2][3][4] in Gotha) was a German philosopher and founder of the Order of Illuminati, a secret society with origins in Bavaria.

Age of Reason

17th century philosophy in the Western world is generally regarded as being the start of modern philosophy, and a departure from the medieval approach, especially Scholasticism.

Alan Charles Kors

Alan Charles Kors is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches the intellectual history of the 17th and 18th centuries. He has received both the Lindback Foundation Award and the Ira Abrams Memorial Award for distinguished college teaching. Dr. Kors graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1964, and he received his M.A. (1965) and Ph.D. (1968) from Harvard University, in European History. He is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.^[1]

Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville (29 July 1805, Paris – 16 April 1859, Cannes) was a French political thinker and historian best known for his Democracy in America (appearing in two volumes: 1835 and 1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). In both of these works, he explored the effects of the rising equality of social conditions on the individual and the state in western societies. Democracy in America (1835), his major work, published after his travels in the United States, is today considered an early work of sociology and political science.

American Declaration of Independence

The United States Declaration of Independence is a statement adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, which announced that the thirteen American colonies then at war with Great Britain were now independent states, and thus no longer a part of the British Empire. Written primarily by Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration is a formal explanation of why Congress had voted on July 2 to declare independence from Great Britain, more than a year after the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War. The birthday of the United States of America—Independence Day—is celebrated on July 4, the day the wording of the Declaration was approved by Congress.

American Enlightenment

The American Enlightenment is a term sometimes employed to describe the intellectual culture of the British North American colonies and the early United States (as they became known following the American Revolution). It was a part of a larger intellectual movement known as the Age of Enlightenment. Influenced by the scientific revolution of the 17th century, the Enlightenment took scientific reasoning and applied it to human nature and society.

American Revolution

The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which the Thirteen Colonies among the possessions in North America of the Kingdom of Great Britain at first rejected the governance of the Parliament of Great Britain, and later the British monarchy itself, to become the sovereign United States of America. During this period, the colonies first rejected the authority of the Parliament to govern them without representation, expelled all royal officials and set up thirteen Provincial Congresses or equivalent to form individual self-governing states. Through representatives sent to the Second Continental Congress, they originally joined together to defend their respective self-governance and manage the armed conflict against the British known as the American Revolutionary War (1775–83, also American War of Independence). The states ultimately determined collectively that the British monarchy, by acts of tyranny, could no longer legitimately claim their allegiance. They then united to form one nation, breaking away from the British Empire in July 1776 when the Congress issued the Declaration of Independence, rejecting the monarchy on behalf of the United States of America. The war ended with effective American victory in October 1781, followed by formal British abandonment of any claims to the United States with the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

Ancient philosophy

This page lists some links to ancient philosophy. In Western philosophy, the spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire marked the end of Hellenistic philosophy and ushered in the beginnings of Medieval philosophy, whereas in Eastern philosophy, the spread of Islam through the Arab Empire marked the end of Old Iranian philosophy and ushered in the beginnings of early Islamic philosophy.

Antoine Lavoisier

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (26 August 1743 – 8 May 1794); French pronunciation: [ɑ̃ˈtwan lɔˈʁɑ̃ də la.vwaˈzje]), the father of modern chemistry,^[1] was a French noble prominent in the histories of chemistry and biology. He stated the first version of the law of conservation of mass,^[2] recognized and named oxygen (1778) and hydrogen (1783), abolished the phlogiston theory, helped construct the metric system, wrote the first extensive list of elements, and helped to reform chemical nomenclature. He discovered that, although matter may change its form or shape, its mass always remains the same. Thus, for instance, if water is heated to steam, if salt is dissolved in water or if a piece of wood is burned to ashes, the total mass remains unchanged. He was also an investor and administrator of the "Ferme Générale" a private tax collection company; chairman of the board of the Discount Bank (later the Banque de France); and a powerful member of a number of other aristocratic administrative councils. All of these political and economic activities enabled him to fund his scientific research. At the height of the French Revolution he was accused by Marat of selling watered-down tobacco, and of other crimes, and was beheaded.^[3][4]

Antonio de Ulloa

Antonio de Ulloa (12 January 1716 – 3 July 1795) was a Spanish general, explorer, author, astronomer, colonial administrator and the first Spanish governor of Louisiana. He was born in Seville, the son of an economist.

Atlantic Revolutions

"Atlantic Revolutions" is a cover term for a wave of late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century revolutions associated with Atlantic history during the The Age of Enlightenment.

Augustin Barruel

Abbé Augustin Barruel (October 2, 1741, Villeneuve-de-Berg, Ardèche – October 5, 1820) was a French Jesuit priest. He is now mostly known for documenting the conspiracy theory involving the Bavarian Illuminati and the Jacobins in his book Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (original title Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire du Jacobinisme) published in 1797. In short, Barruel wrote that the French Revolution was planned and executed by the secret societies.

Authority

The word authority derives from the Latin word auctoritas meaning invention, advice, opinion, influence or commands which originate from an auctor indicating that authority originates from a master, leader or author. Essentially authority is imposed by superiors upon inferiors either by force of arms (structural authority) or by force of argument (sapiential authority). Usually authority has components of both compulsion and persuasion. For this reason, as used in Roman law authority is differentiated potestas (legal or military power) and imperium (persuasive political rank or standing).

Balthasar Bekker

Balthasar Bekker (March 20 1634 - June 11 1698), Dutch divine and author of philosophical and theological works. Opposing superstition, he was a key figure in the end of the witchcraft persecutions in early modern Europe.

Baron d'Holbach

Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach (8 December 1723 – 21 January 1789^[1]) was a French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist and a prominent figure in the French Enlightenment. He was born Paul Heinrich Dietrich in Edesheim, near Landau in the Rhenish Palatinate, but lived and worked mainly in Paris, where he kept a salon. He is best known for his atheism, and for his voluminous writings against religion, the most famous of them being the System of Nature.

Baruch Spinoza

Baruch or Benedict de Spinoza (Hebrew: ברוך שפינוזה‎, Portuguese: Bento de Espinosa, Latin: Benedictus de Spinoza) (November 24, 1632 – February 21, 1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Jewish origin.^[1] Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death. Today, he is considered one of the great rationalists^[2] of 17th-century philosophy, laying the groundwork for the 18th century Enlightenment^[2] and modern biblical criticism.^[2] By virtue of his magnum opus, the posthumous Ethics, in which he opposed Descartes' mind–body dualism, Spinoza is considered to be one of Western philosophy's most important philosophers. Philosopher and historian Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said of all modern philosophers, "You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all."^[3]

Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro

Benito Jerónimo Feijoo y Montenegro (Casdemiro, Galicia, 8 October 1674– Oviedo, Asturias, 26 September 1764) was a Spanish monk and scholar noted for encouraging scientific and empirical thought in an effort to debunk myths and superstitions.

Benito Jerónimo Feijoo

Benito Jerónimo Feijoo y Montenegro (Casdemiro, Galicia, 8 October 1674– Oviedo, Asturias, 26 September 1764) was a Spanish monk and scholar noted for encouraging scientific and empirical thought in an effort to debunk myths and superstitions.

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705^[1]] – April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author and printer, satirist, political theorist, politician, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, soldier,^[2] and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, a carriage odometer, and the glass 'armonica'. He formed both the first public lending library in America and the first fire department in Pennsylvania. He was an early proponent of colonial unity, and as a political writer and activist, he supported the idea of an American nation.^[3] As a diplomat during the American Revolution, he secured the French alliance that helped to make independence of the United States possible.

Binomial nomenclature

The formal system of naming species is called binominal nomenclature (especially in zoological circles), binary nomenclature (especially in botanical circles), or the binomial classification system. The essence of it is that each species name is in (modern scientific) Latin and has two parts, so that it is popularly known as the Latin name of the species, although this terminology is avoided by biologists and philologists, who prefer the term scientific name. Instead of using the full seven-category system (kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species) in naming an organism, Karl von Linne chose to use a two-word naming system. He adopted the binominal nomenclature scheme, using only the genus name and the specific name or epithet which together form the species name. For example, humans belong to genus Homo and their specific name is sapiens. Humans as a species are thus classified as Homo sapiens. The first letter of the first name, the genus, is always capitalized, while that of the second is not, even when derived from a proper noun such as the name of a person or place. Conventionally, all names of genera and lower taxa are always italicised, while family names and higher taxa are printed in plain text. Species can be divided into a further rank, giving rise to a trinomial name or trinomen for a subspecies.

Biography

A biography is a description or account of someone's life and the times, which is usually published in the form of a book or an essay, or in some other form, such as a film. An autobiography (auto meaning "self," giving "self-biography") is a biography of a person's life written or told by that same person. A biography is more than a list of impersonal facts (education, work, relationships, and death), it also portrays the subject's experience of those events. Unlike a profile or curriculum vitae (résumé), a biography presents the subject's story, highlighting various aspects of his or her life, including intimate details of experiences, and may include an analysis of the subject's personality.

Boyle's Law

Boyle's law (sometimes referred to as the Boyle-Mariotte law) is one of several gas laws and a special case of the ideal gas law. Boyle's law describes the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas, if the temperature is kept constant within a closed system.^[1][2] The law was named after chemist and physicist Robert Boyle, who published the original law in 1662.^[3] The law itself can be stated as follows:

Café Procope

Café Procope, in rue de l'Ancienne Comédie, 6th arrondissement, is one of the oldest restaurants of Paris. It was opened in 1686 by the Sicilian Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli, with a slyly subversive name adopted from the historian Procopius, whose Secret History, the Anekdota, long known of, had been discovered in the Vatican Library and published for the first time ever in 1623: it told the scandals of Emperor Justinian, his ex-dancer Empress, and his court.^[1]

Camille Desmoulins

Lucie Simplice Camille Benoist Desmoulins (March 2, 1760 – April 5, 1794) was a French journalist and politician who played an important role in the French Revolution. He was closely associated with Georges Danton.

Carl Linnaeus

Carl Linnaeus (Latinized as Carolus Linnaeus, also known after his ennoblement as Carl von Linné (help·info), 23 May [O.S. 12 May] 1707 – 10 January 1778) was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of binomial nomenclature. He is known as the father of modern taxonomy, and is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology.

Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu

Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (English pronunciation: /ˈmɒntɨskjuː/; 18 January 1689, La Brède, Gironde – 10 February 1755), was a French social commentator and political thinker who lived during the Era of the Enlightenment. He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, taken for granted in modern discussions of government and implemented in many constitutions throughout the world. He was largely responsible for the popularization of the terms feudalism and Byzantine Empire.

Chinese philosophy

Chinese philosophy is philosophy written in the Chinese tradition of thought. Chinese philosophy has a history of several thousand years; its origins are often traced back to the Yi Jing (the Book of Changes), an ancient compendium of divination, which uses a system of 64 hexagrams to guide action. This system is attributed to King Wen of Zhou (1099–1050 BCE) and the work reflects the characteristic concepts and approaches of Chinese philosophy. The Book of Changes evolved in stages over the next eight centuries, but the first recorded reference is in 672 BCE. ^[1]

Classical liberalism

Classical liberalism is a political ideology that developed in the 19th century in England, Western Europe, and the Americas. It followed earlier forms of liberalism in its commitment to personal freedom and popular government, but differed from earlier forms of liberalism in its commitment to free markets and classical economics.^[1] Notable classical liberals in the 19th century include Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo. Classical liberalism was revived in the 20th century by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, and further developed by Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick, Loren Lomasky, and Jan Narveson.^[2]

Coffeehouse

A coffeehouse or coffee shop (French/Portuguese: café; Spanish: cafetería or café; Italian: caffè, German: Café or Kaffeehaus, Greek: Καφενείο, Καφενές, or Καφετέρια, Turkish: Kahvehane, Catalan: cafè) is an establishment which primarily serves prepared coffee or other hot beverages. It shares some of the characteristics of a bar, and some of the characteristics of a restaurant, but it is different from a cafeteria. As the name suggests, coffeehouses focus on providing coffee and tea as well as light snacks. Many coffee houses in the Muslim world, and in Muslim districts in the West, offer shisha (Nargile in Turkish), flavored tobacco smoked through a hookah.

Commission for National Education

The Commission of National Education (Polish: Komisja Edukacji Narodowej, abbreviated KEN) was the central educational authority in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, created by the Sejm and king Stanisław August Poniatowski on October 14, 1773. Because of its vast authority and autonomy, it is considered the first Ministry of Education in history and an important achievement of the Polish Enlightenment.^[1][2]

Common Sense (pamphlet)

Common Sense^[1] is a pamphlet written by Thomas Paine. It was first published anonymously on January 10, 1776, during the American Revolution. Common Sense, signed "Written by an Englishman", became an immediate success.^[2] In relation to the population of the Colonies at that time, it had the largest sale and circulation of any book in American history. Common Sense presented the American colonists with a powerful argument for independence from British rule at a time when the question of independence was still undecided. Paine wrote and reasoned in a style that common people understood; forgoing the philosophy and Latin references used by Enlightenment era writers, Paine structured Common Sense like a sermon and relied on Biblical references to make his case to the people.^[3] Historian Gordon S. Wood described Common Sense as, "the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era".^[4]

Condorcet

Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (17 September 1743 – 28 March 1794), known as Nicolas de Condorcet, was a French philosopher, mathematician, and early political scientist who devised the concept of a Condorcet method. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he advocated a liberal economy, free and equal public education, constitutionalism, and equal rights for women and people of all races. His ideas and writings were said to embody the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment and rationalism, and remain influential to this day. He died a mysterious death in prison after a period of being a fugitive from French Revolutionary authorities.

Conservatism

Conservatism (Latin: conservare, to "save" or "preserve")^[1] is a political attitude and philosophy that advocates institutions and traditional practices that have developed organically,^[2][3] thus emphasizing stability and continuity.^[3] The first established use of the term in a political context was by François-René de Chateaubriand in 1819, following the French Revolution.^[4] The term has since been used to describe a variety of politicians with a wide range of views.

Constitution of May 3, 1791

The Constitution of May 3, 1791 (Polish: Konstytucja Trzeciego Maja; Lithuanian: Gegužės trečiosios konstitucija) is generally regarded as Europe's first and the world's second modern codified national constitution, following the 1788 ratification of the United States Constitution (look also: Corsican Constitution).^{[1][2][3] [a]} The May 3, 1791, Constitution was adopted as a "Government Act" (Polish: Ustawa rządowa) on that date by the Sejm (parliament) of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was in effect for only a year, until the Russo-Polish War of 1792.

Contemporary philosophy

Contemporary philosophy is the present period in the history of Western philosophy beginning at the end of the nineteenth century with the professionalization of the discipline and the rise of analytic and continental philosophy. Continental philosophy began with the work of Brentano, Husserl, and Reinach on the development of the philosophical method of phenomenology. This development was roughly contemporaneous with work by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell inaugurating a new philosophical method based on the analysis of language via modern logic (hence the term "analytic philosophy").^[1]

Counter-Enlightenment

"Counter-Enlightenment" is a term used to refer to a movement that arose in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries in opposition to the eighteenth century Enlightenment. The term is usually associated with Isaiah Berlin, who is often credited with coining it, perhaps taking up a passing remark of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who used the term Gegenaufklärung at the end of the nineteenth century. It has not been widely used since. The first known use of the term 'counter-enlightenment' in English was in 1949. Berlin published widely about the Enlightenment and its enemies and did much to popularise the concept of a Counter-Enlightenment movement that he characterised as relativist, anti-rationalist, vitalist and organic,^[1] and which he associated most closely with German Romanticism. Some recent scholarship^[who?] has challenged this view for focusing too narrowly on Germany and stopping abruptly in the early nineteenth century, thereby ignoring the Enlightenment's many subsequent critics, particularly in the twentieth century. Some scholars^[who?] reject the use of the term 'the Counter-Enlightenment' on the grounds that there was no single Enlightenment for its alleged enemies to oppose.

Criminal law

The term criminal law, sometimes called penal law, refers to any of various bodies of rules in different jurisdictions whose common characteristic is the potential for unique and often severe impositions as punishment for failure to comply. Criminal punishment, depending on the offense and jurisdiction, may include execution, loss of liberty, government supervision (parole or probation), or fines. There are some archetypal crimes, like murder, but the acts that are forbidden are not wholly consistent between different criminal codes, and even within a particular code lines may be blurred as civil infractions may give rise also to criminal consequences. Criminal law typically is enforced by the government, unlike the civil law, which may be enforced by private parties.

Critical philosophy

Attributed to Immanuel Kant, the critical philosophy movement sees the primary task of philosophy as criticism rather than justification of knowledge; criticism, for Kant, meant judging as to the possibilities of knowledge before advancing to knowledge itself (from the Greek kritike (techne), or "art of judgment"). The initial, and perhaps even sole task of philosophers, according to this view, is not to establish and demonstrate theories about reality, but rather to subject all theories--including those about philosophy itself--to critical review, and measure their validity by how well they withstand criticism.

Critical thinking

Critical thinking is the purposeful and reflective judgement about what to believe or what to do in response to observations, experience, verbal or written expressions, or arguments. Critical thinking involves determining the meaning and significance of what is observed or expressed, or, concerning a given inference or argument, determining whether there is adequate justification to accept the conclusion as true. Hence, Fisher & Scriven define critical thinking as "Skilled, active, interpretation and evaluation of observations, communications, information, and argumentation."^[1] Parker & Moore define it more naturally as the careful, deliberate determination of whether one should accept, reject, or suspend judgment about a claim and the degree of confidence with which one accepts or rejects it.^[2]

D'Alembert

Jean le Rond d'Alembert (16 November 1717 – 29 October 1783) was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist and philosopher. He was also co-editor with Denis Diderot of the Encyclopédie. D'Alembert's method for the wave equation is named after him.

D'Alembert's

Jean le Rond d'Alembert (16 November 1717 – 29 October 1783) was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist and philosopher. He was also co-editor with Denis Diderot of the Encyclopédie. D'Alembert's method for the wave equation is named after him.

D’Alembert

Jean le Rond d'Alembert (16 November 1717 – 29 October 1783) was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist and philosopher. He was also co-editor with Denis Diderot of the Encyclopédie. D'Alembert's method for the wave equation is named after him.

Daniel Roche

Daniel Roche (26 July 1935 - ) is a French social and cultural historian. His primary field of research is the cultural history of France during the later years of the Ancien Régime.

David Hume

David Hume (7 May 1711 [26 April O.S.] – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, economist, historian and a key figure in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume is often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist.^[1]

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (French: Déclaration des droits de l'Homme et du citoyen) is a fundamental document of the French Revolution, defining the individual and collective rights of all the estates of the realm as universal. Influenced by the doctrine of natural rights, the rights of Man are universal: valid at all times and in every place, pertaining to human nature itself. Although it establishes fundamental rights for French citizens and all men without exception, it addresses neither the status of women nor slavery; despite that, it is a precursor document to international human rights instruments.

Democracy

Democracy is a political government either carried out by the people (direct democracy), or the power to govern is granted to elected representatives (Representative democracy). The term is derived from the Greek: δημοκρατία - (dēmokratía) "the power to the people",^[1] which was coined from δῆμος (dêmos) "people" and κράτος (krátos) "power", in the middle of the fifth-fourth century BC to denote the political systems then existing in some Greek city-states, notably Athens following a popular uprising in 508 BC.^[2] Even though there is no specific, universally accepted definition of 'democracy',^[3] there are two principles that any definition of democracy includes, equality and freedom.^{[4][dubious – discuss]} These principles are reflected by all citizens being equal before the law, and having equal access to power,^[5] and freedom is secured by legitimized rights and liberties, which are generally protected by a constitution.^[6][7]

Denis Diderot

Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 – July 31, 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic and writer. He was a prominent figure during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as chief editor of and contributor to the creation of the Encyclopédie.

Diafotismos

Diafotismos (Greek: Διαφωτισμός; "enlightenment," "illumination" from fos "light"), The Modern Greek Enlightenment was an ideological, philological, linguistic and philosophical movement among 18th century Greeks that attempted to translate the ideas and values of European Enlightenment into the Greek world of ideas.