• Take a look at the French and Indian War Home Page: A Work in Progress

Reading: Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography.

Benjamin Franklin: Chronology

An exhibit from The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia

     Some Notes on the Enlightenment

    General Resources on Benjamin Franklin

    European Enlightenment

            Changes in European thought and letters

            a term coined by the people who lived through it

            beginning

                       fullest articulation in activities of the philosophes
                     draw on predecessors dating back to the thirteenth century
 

    Seventeenth Century

            main components

                    fundamentally rational universe

                    truth derived through empirical observation

                    human experience the foundation of human understanding

                    human life understood the same way the natural world is understood

                    human history is a history of progress

                    human beings can be improved through education

                    religious doctrines have no place in the understanding of physical and human worlds
 

    Two distinct developments

                    Scientific Revolution (sourcebook from Fordham U.)

                    Application to the interpretive sciences
 

    Major Thinkers

                    Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)   See general biographical notes.

                         The Leviathan (1660).  Text and Search.

                         spent time with Galileo (see notes on Galileo from Virginia)

                            read William Harvey

                            revision of political philosophy

                                should be based on rationality

                                all human law derives from natural law

                            human beings simply material, physical objects

                            all human beings are selfish

                            no one really safe from others

                            necessity for social contract

                            social contract enforced by a monarch

                    Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677).  See full Spinoza web site.

                            application of Hobbes to ethics and philosophy

                            God and nature identical

                            human freedom exists only in abstract thinking

                            the common right

                            democracy best way to balance human rights

                   John  Locke (1632-1704).  See general biographical notes.

                            all knowledge is empirical

                            all humans enter with same capacities; therefore all are equal

                            problems therefore occur with the environment

                            humans enter into social contracts; no sense of absolute power
 

        Philosophes movement

                full values: deism, religous tolerance
                job of the monarch is to see to the rights and welfare of the governed
                government made more rational
                decline of monarchical power
                English idea of interest coalitions
 

        Revolutions marking the last quarter of the century
 

        Scientific Revolution (in brief!)

                systematic doubt
                empirical and sensory verification
                abstraction of human knowledge
                world functioning like a machine
 
 

You may wish to look at a developing resourceon early America.

And at a hypertext project on American History.

Commerce, The Enlightenment and Global Politics

Previous Class | | | | Next Class 

Course Syllabus

Michael O'Toole Home Page  ||||   Penn State Homepage