What was the Enlightenment? Reason, Revolt, and Philosophy

In the 17th and 18th centuries, Europeans largely lived under undemocratic or autocratic governments, with institutional forces hostile to free scientific inquiry, where women, non-Christians and non-Europeans had few rights, and class hierarchies left vast numbers toiling at subsistence while others lived in opulence. Yet, in that same time period, a robust network of thinkers, including an excommunicated Jew, orphaned ex-governess, exiled French aristocrat, and itinerant philosopher from Geneva, produced a body of revolutionary texts now known as the central works of the Enlightenment. Through high-minded debates, petty quarrels, and politically charged screeds, these thinkers questioned nearly everything, including the authority of monarchs, the nature of certainty, the meaning of human suffering, the origin of inequality, and the compatibility of reason with religion. But how did they, and how can we, understand the Enlightenment as a coherent movement? What distinguished, in this Age of Reason, intellectual inquiry from the philosophical methods employed by the “pre-modern” philosophers of the West, from Plato to Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas? And how can we understand the Enlightenment’s contested legacy today? In what ways do we continue to think with, and also against, the Enlightenment worldview that marks the emergence of the modern West?

This course offers a brief introduction to the Enlightenment through some of the key controversies and thinkers. Over four weeks, we will explore competing understandings of scientific truth; the question of when and why people have the right to revolt against unjust regimes, with real-world implications for women’s rights and revolutions in Europe, the Caribbean, North and South America; the problem of evil after a 1755 earthquake flattened the city of Lisbon on All Soul’s Day; and the late eighteenth century Pantheism debate, bringing to a head the question of whether reason led inevitably to atheism. Readings will be drawn from works by Baruch Spinoza, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft, Immanuel Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, and Gotthold Lessing. No prior experience with the thinkers or philosophy required.