Summary of Anthony Pagden's The Enlightenment , livre ebook

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53 pages

English

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Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#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.

Sujets

Religion

Histoire

General officer

General

History

Europe

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Publié par	Everest Media LLC
Date de parution	03 mai 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781669399742
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0000€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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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 who brings Nature in.

#15

The first of the two antithetical positions described by Carneades was the one sustained by the Stoics; the second, that held by the Epicureans. Together with Skepticism, they had been the dominant schools of philosophy in the ancient world. With the rise of Christianity, however, Skepticism and most forms of Epicureanism were silenced.

#16

The Scientific Revolution was a true revolution in the modern sense of the term. It was not a reevaluation of a hallowed past, but a radical, decisive, and irreparable break.

#17

The Enlightenment was a revolution in thought and belief that took place in the eighteenth century. It was based on the idea that all humans belong to a single race, and that they share a common identity and ultimately belong to a global community.

#18

The hierarchy of laws was based on the positive, or human, law, which was created by societies to govern their members. The law of nature was understood as the law that governed every action that occurred in the natural world.

#19

The natural law was originally the sum of all the behavior of all living creatures. It was non-specific, and humans shared it with the animal kingdom. But the theologians transformed it into something that distinguished mankind from all other forms of life.

#20

The Law of Nations was a natural law that applied beyond the limits of particular states. It was originally the law used by the Romans in their dealing with the gentes, or non-Roman citizens. But no one could decide if it was a part of the natural law or a positive law that had been introduced by the probable and common estimation of men.

#21

Aquinas’s natural law was mankind’s participation in the Eternal Law. It allowed humans to read in nature, as if it were a book on which God had written his will, regarding all actions and ends that are fitting for all human beings.

#22

The Thomists, who were followers of St. Thomas Aquinas, believed that natural law was made accessible to all humans by means of innate ideas that had been inscribed in the minds of all human beings by God at the creation.

#23

The first precepts of the natural law are very basic. They allow you to know that killing, theft, rape, and incest are all unnatural. They cannot, however, offer much guidance about all the myriad codes of conduct that exist in every society.

#24

The idea of a single, universal law governing human conduct was shattered when it was discovered that entire continents were filled with people who had very different views on the fitness of their actions and ends from those of Europeans.

#25

Montaigne had a famous encounter at Rouen in 1561 with a group of Tupinamba cannibals brought back from the coasts of Brazil. He came to the conclusion that the laws of conscience are born of custom, and not nature.

#26

All humans are by their very nature social beings. Social life was considered the natural state for humans, and it was only in society that humans could fulfill their potential as human beings.

#27

The most important of the primary precepts of the law of nature was Love thy neighbor as thyself. Christianity, although it could not be fully comprehended by humans, was believed to be a preeminently rational religion.

#28

Grotius and Hobbes were two of the first major thinkers to write about natural law, and they shared many of the same principles. They were, however, very different in their methods. Grotius wrote a traditional natural-law treatise, while Hobbes wrote a philosophical work in English that was meant to be understood by a wide audience.

#29

The general inclination of mankind, according to Hobbes, is a perpetual and restless desire of power after power. There is no ultimate good, because the desires that drive all humankind can never be satisfied. The world’s religions have conjured up images of the afterlife, but very few people ever actually choose to die.

#30

The law of nature, as stated by Hobbes, is simply the right to use your own power as you see fit for the preservation of your own life. It can be torn from its elaborate metaphysical moorings and reduced to one simple, irrefutable principle.

#31

Hobbes’s answer to how societies were formed was simple self-interest. In his state of nature, there are no gods, no celestial dinner tables, no garden eastward of Eden provided with all that mankind requires to survive.

#32

The state is not natural, it is artificial. It is the result of a contract between individuals to ensure the continuation of the species. The sovereign’s power is absolute so long as he does not infringe on every individual’s natural right to self-protection.

#33

The seventeenth century saw the attack on scholasticism, and the birth of modern philosophy. It was a profoundly unsettling vision of the human condition, but it was also extremely convincing.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

The Enlightenment was an attempt to recover the vision of a unified and essentially benign humanity, a potentially cosmopolitan world, without also having to accept the theologians’ claim that this could only make sense as part of the larger plan of a well-meaning, but deeply inscrutable, deity.

#2

The Hobbesian and Grotian conception of the human reduced the natural law to a single irrefutable principle, and reduced it to a right. But they couldn’t account for all the variety of human experience.

#3

The first person to attempt a deeper, more sympathetic account of humanity’s basic instincts was the Saxon historian and jurist Samuel Pufendorf. He wrote in 1671 that the human mind always requires an opinion to which it can attach itself.

#4