Summary of Anthony Pagden's The Enlightenment

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Apr 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669399742

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Insights on Anthony Pagden's The Enlightenment

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 1

#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.

#5

The system that the thinkers of the seventeenth century destroyed was actually theology and scholasticism, which was a vague term that was often used to describe the teaching in medieval European universities.

#6

The scholastics were theologians. They studied God’s intentions, which were often unclear to them, through the Bible and other Greek writings. They transformed Christianity from a world-rejecting late Roman mystery cult into a heavily Hellenized Judaism.

#7

The method employed by the scholastics was hermeneutical. They would read and reread a canon of supposedly authoritative texts, which by the sixteenth century had been expanded to include the writings of the early Greek and Latin theologians and saints.

#8

The Scientific Revolution, which brought about the marginalization of theology, also undermined the idea that there could exist one single source of knowledge or authority.

#9

The Reformation, which was a revolt against the Catholic Church, was the beginning of the shift in Europe from religion to ideology. The seventeenth century saw the beginning of the shift in Europe from religion to ideology, as people began to fight one another over beliefs.

#10

The Peace of Westphalia, which was signed in 1648, was the first treaty between sovereign nations that created a lasting peace and not just a temporary ceasefire. It was also the first to recognize the existence of two new states, the United Netherlands and the Swiss Confederation.

#11

The Reformation, and the violence it unleashed upon Europe, created a situation in which no faction could hope to emerge victorious. Thus, no faction was willing to tolerate the existence of others.

#12

The Peace of Westphalia, which was signed in 1648, drew a curtain between a Catholic south and a predominantly Protestant north. The north, which had once been poor and backward, became rich and urban, while the south, in particular Italy, Spain, and Portugal, which had been the most powerful and inventive regions of Europe, began to decline.

#13

The European discovery of America and the new facts about the rest of the world radically upset the long-cherished idea that Europe’s science and all that had been based upon it was omniscient.

#14

The reason of the ancients had denied that life could exist below the equator. The discovery of America had shown that it could. As Galileo was to say later, One thousand Demosthenes and one thousand Aristotles may be routed by an average man