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
And at a hypertext project on American History.
Commerce, The Enlightenment and Global Politics
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