INTRODUCTION
The Age of Enlightenment, or simply the Enlightenment,[note 2] was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries with global influences and effects.[2][3] The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of knowledge obtained by means of reason and the evidence of the senses, and ideals such as liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.[4][5]The Enlightenment has its roots in a European intellectual and scholarly movement known as Renaissance humanism and was also preceded by the Scientific Revolution and the work of Francis Bacon, among others. Some date the beginning of the Enlightenment back to the publication of René Descartes' Discourse on the Method in 1637, featuring his famous dictum, Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"). Others cite the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687) as the culmination of the Scientific Revolution and the beginning of the Enlightenment. European historians traditionally date its beginning with the death of Louis XIV of France in 1715 and its end with the 1789 outbreak of the French Revolution. Many historians now date the end of the Enlightenment as the start of the 19th century, with the latest proposed year being the death of Immanuel Kant in 1804.
Philosophers and scientists of the period widely circulated their ideas through meetings
at scientific academies, Masonic lodges, literary salons, coffeehouses and in printed books, journals, and pamphlets. The ideas of the Enlightenment undermined the authority of the monarchy and the Catholic Church and paved the way for the political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. A variety of 19th-century movements,
including liberalism, communism, and neoclassicism, trace their intellectual heritage to the Enlightenment.[6]
In France, the central doctrines of the Enlightenment philosophers were individual liberty and religious tolerance, in opposition to an absolute monarchy and the fixed dogmas of the Church. The Enlightenment was marked by an emphasis on the scientific method and reductionism, along with increased questioning of religious orthodoxy—an attitude captured by Immanuel Kant's essay Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment, where the phrase Sapere aude (Dare to know) can be found.[7]
This paper highlights major contributions in the process of human enlightening by looking into the roots of philosophy from Greeks trough the modern western philosophers.
The word enlightenment, in this paper, is not meant, merely, the western movement of enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rather, it is taken as ‘education that results in understanding and the spread of knowledge’ (Princeton Education). This paper then becomes a brief note on human effort of broadening and strengthening his understandings about himself and the universe.
Enlightenment, according to Kant, is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use ones understanding without guidance from other. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [Dare to know] “Have courage to use your own understanding!” —that is the motto of enlightenment.
With this definition of enlightenment one can travel through the course of history and find out philosophers who tried to implement their understanding rather than taking the established truths for granted. This is how a passage of human enlightening can be traced through the history.
The evolution of human knowledge is long and scattered across the globe.
The term, philosophy, akin to many other basic concepts like arts, truth and normalcy etc, does not contain a single unified definition. Until recently, theology and philosophy were not considered two different disciplines of studies. Even when we include the names like Aristotle, Newton, and Michelangelo etc,
in the history of philosophy, we pretend to mean that philosophy is not a branch of knowledge rather it is mother of all knowledge (Martin Oliver). The concept, though seems vague, is not far away from reality. History of philosophy at its core is history of ideas. Human inspiration towards exploring the very nature of physical and metaphysical objects is thus philosophy and for that reason not a single branch of knowledge is beyond the scope of it.
This paper underlines the course of western philosophy. Staring from the Greeks, it covers the remarkable work of western philosophers. Besides providing an overview of major philosophical moments like Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Counter enlightenment, Romanticism etc, it underlines the impact of philosophical understanding in different religious and societal moments of the west. Further, it gives a glimpse of notable contributions of philosophers in each movement and era.
