The Enlightenments important 17th-century precursors included the Englishmen Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, the Frenchman Renee Descartes and the key natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution, including Galileo, Kepler and Leibniz. Its roots are usually traced to 1680s England, where in the span of three years Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica (1686) and John Locke his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)two works that provided the scientific, mathematical and philosophical toolkit for the Enlightenments major advances.

In his essay "What Is Enlightenment?" (1784), the German philosopher Immanuel Kant summed up the era's motto in the following terms: "Dare to know! Have courage to use your own reason!"

Locke argued that human nature was mutable and that knowledge was gained through accumulated experience rather than by accessing some sort of outside truth. Newtons calculus and optical theories provided the powerful Enlightenment metaphors for precisely measured change and illumination.

There was no single, unified Enlightenment. Instead, it is possible to speak of the French Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment and the English, German, Swiss or American Enlightenment. Individual Enlightenment thinkers often had very different approaches. Locke differed from Hume, Rousseau from Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson from Frederick the Great. Their differences and disagreements, though, emerged out of the common Enlightenment themes of rational questioning and belief in progress through dialogue.

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Enlightenment - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com

The Age of Enlightenment (or simply the Enlightenment or Age of Reason) was a cultural movement of intellectuals beginning in late 17th-century Western Europe emphasizing reason and individualism rather than tradition.[1] It spread across Europe and to the United States, continuing to the end of the 18th century. Its purpose was to reform society using reason, to challenge ideas grounded in tradition and faith, and to advance knowledge through the scientific method. It promoted scientific thought, skepticism, and intellectual interchange.[2] The Enlightenment was a revolution in human thought. This new way of thinking was that rational thought begins with clearly stated principles, uses correct logic to arrive at conclusions, tests the conclusions against evidence, and then revises the principles in the light of the evidence.

Enlightenment thinkers opposed superstition. Some Enlightenment thinkers collaborated with Enlightened despots, absolutist rulers who attempted to forcibly put some of the new ideas about government into practice. The ideas of the Enlightenment continue to exert significant influence on the culture, politics, and governments of the Western world.

Originating around the 17th century, it was mainly sparked by philosophers such as Francis Bacon (1562-1626), Ren Descartes (1596-1650), Baruch Spinoza (16321677), John Locke (16321704), Pierre Bayle (16471706), Voltaire (16941778), Francis Hutcheson, (16941746), David Hume (17111776), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Isaac Newton (16431727).[3] Ruling princes often endorsed and fostered these figures and even attempted to apply their ideas of government in what was known as enlightened absolutism. The Scientific Revolution is closely tied to the Enlightenment, as its discoveries overturned many traditional concepts and introduced new perspectives on nature and man's place within it. The Enlightenment flourished until about 17901800, at which point the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason, gave way to Romanticism, which placed a new emphasis on emotion; a Counter-Enlightenment began to increase in prominence. The Romantics argued that the Enlightenment was reductionistic insofar as it had largely ignored the forces of imagination, mystery, and sentiment.[4]

In France, Enlightenment was based in the salons and culminated in the great Encyclopdie (175172) edited by Denis Diderot (17131784) and (until 1759) Jean le Rond d'Alembert (17171783) with contributions by hundreds of leading intellectuals who were called philosophes, notably Voltaire (16941778), Rousseau (17121778) and Montesquieu (16891755). Some 25,000 copies of the 35 volume encyclopedia were sold, half of them outside France. These new intellectual strains would spread to urban centres across Europe, notably England, Scotland, the German states, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Italy, Austria, Spain. It was also very successful in the United States, where its influence was manifested in the works of Francophiles like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, among others. It played a major role in the American Revolution. The political ideals of the Enlightenment influenced the American Declaration of Independence, the United States Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and the PolishLithuanian Constitution of May 3, 1791.[5]

The term "Enlightenment" did not come into use in English until the latter part of the 19th century,[6] with particular reference to French philosophy, as the equivalent of the French term 'Lumires' (used first by Dubos in 1733 and already well established by 1751). From Immanuel Kant's 1784 essay "Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklrung?" ("Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?") the German term became 'Aufklrung' (aufklren = to illuminate; sich aufklren = to clear up).

"For Kant, Enlightenment was mankind's final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance."[7] According to historian Roy Porter, the thesis of the liberation of the human mind from the dogmatic state of ignorance that he argues was prevalent at the time is the epitome of what the age of enlightenment was trying to capture. According to Bertrand Russell, however, the enlightenment was a phase in a progressive development, which began in antiquity, and that reason and challenges to the established order were constant ideals throughout that time.[8]

Russell argues that the enlightenment was ultimately born out of the Protestant reaction against the Catholic counter-reformation, when the philosophical views of the past two centuries crystallized into a coherent world view. He argues that many of the philosophical views, such as affinity for democracy against monarchy, originated among Protestants in the early 16th century to justify their desire to break away from the Pope and the Catholic Church. Though many of these philosophical ideals were picked up by Catholics, Russell argues, by the 18th century the Enlightenment was the principal manifestation of the schism that began with Martin Luther.[8]

Chartier (1991) argues that the Enlightenment was only invented after the fact for a political goal. He claims the leaders of the French Revolution created an Enlightenment canon of basic text, by selecting certain authors and identifying them with The Enlightenment in order to legitimize their republican political agenda.[9]

Historian Jonathan Israel rejects the attempts of postmodern and Marxian historians to understand the revolutionary ideas of the period purely as by-products of social and economic transformations.[10] He instead focuses on the history of ideas in the period from 1650 to the end of the 18th century, and claims that it was the ideas themselves that caused the change that eventually led to the revolutions of the latter half of the 18th century and the early 19th century.[11] Israel argues that until the 1650s Western civilization "was based on a largely shared core of faith, tradition and authority".[12]

Up until this date most intellectual debates revolved around "confessional" - that is Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed (Calvinist), or Anglican issues, and the main aim of these debates was to establish which bloc of faith ought to have the "monopoly of truth and a God-given title to authority".[13] After this date everything thus previously rooted in tradition was questioned and often replaced by new concepts in the light of philosophical reason. After the second half of the 17th century and during the 18th century a "general process of rationalization and secularization set in which rapidly overthrew theology's age-old hegemony in the world of study", and thus confessional disputes were reduced to a secondary status in favor of the "escalating contest between faith and incredulity".[13]

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Age of Enlightenment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Devices

Enlightenment and EFL use desktop Linux systems as a primary method of development because it is fast and simple to do so, but all of it is written with the express goal in mind of also working on devices from Mobile Phones, to Televisions, Netbooks and more.

We have run and tested on x86-32, x86-64, Atom, Power-PC, ARM (ARM9, ARM11, Cortex-A8 and more), MIPS, Sparc, and many other architectures. The suggested minimum RAM required for a full Linux system + EFL application is 16MB, but you may be able to get by on 8MB. For full functionality 64MB or more is suggested. As little as a 200Mhz ARM core will provide sufficient processing power (depending on needs).

Screens from even less than QVGA (320x240 or 240x320) screens all the way up to and beyond full-HD (1920x1080) are covered by EFL. It has the ability to scale user interfaces to almost any sane resolution, as well as adapt to differing input device resolutions, from mouse and stylus to fat fingers. It can draw displays from e-paper through 8-bit paletted displays, 16bit beautifully dithered ones all the way to full 24/32bit OLED beauties.

Enlightenment is built by designers and programmers who want others to be able to do more with less. Some of Enlightenment's libraries do not do anything with graphics at all, but it is the ones that do that are the shining stars of the Enlightenment world.

Evas is the canvas layer. It is not a drawing library. It is not like OpenGL, Cairo, XRender, GDI, DirectFB etc. It is a scene graph library that retains state of all objects in it. They are created then manipulated until they are no longer needed, at which point they are deleted. This allows the programmer to work in terms that a designer thinks of. It is direct mapping, as opposed to having to convert the concepts into drawing commands in the right order, calculate minimum drawing calls needed to get the job done etc.

Evas also handles abstracting the rendering mechanism. With zero changes the same application can move from software to OpenGL rendering, as they all use an abstracted scene graph to describe the world (canvas) to Evas. Evas supports multiple targets, but the most useful are the high-speed software rendering engines and OpenGL (as well as OpenGL-ES 2.0).

Evas not only does quality rendering and compositing, but also can scale, rotate and fully 3D transform objects, allowing for sought-after 3D effects in your interfaces. It supplies these abilities in both software and OpenGL rendering, so you are never caught with unexpected loss of features. The software rendering is even fast enough to provide the 3D without any acceleration on devices for simple uses.

Edje is a meta-object design library that is somewhere between Flash, PSD, SVG and HTML+CSS. It separates design out from code and into a dynamically loaded data file. This file is compressed and loaded very quickly, along with being cached and shared betweeen instances.

This allows design to be provided at runtime by different design (EDJ) files, leaving the programmer to worry about overall application implementation and coarse grained UI as opposed to needing to worry about all the little details that the artists may vary even until the day before shipping the product.

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Enlightenment - About

In this era dedicated to human progress, the advancement of the natural sciences is regarded as the main exemplification of, and fuel for, such progress. Isaac Newton's epochal accomplishment in his Principia Mathematica (1687), which, very briefly described, consists in the comprehension of a diversity of physical phenomena in particular the motions of heavenly bodies, together with the motions of sublunary bodies in few relatively simple, universally applicable, mathematical laws, was a great stimulus to the intellectual activity of the eighteenth century and served as a model and inspiration for the researches of a number of Enlightenment thinkers. Newton's system strongly encourages the Enlightenment conception of nature as an orderly domain governed by strict mathematical-dynamical laws and the conception of ourselves as capable of knowing those laws and thus plumbing the secrets of nature through the exercise of our unaided faculties. The conception of nature, and of how we know it, changes significantly with the rise of modern science. It belongs centrally to the agenda of Enlightenment philosophy to contribute to the new knowledge of nature, and to provide a metaphysical framework within which to place and interpret this new knowledge.

Ren Descartes' rationalist system of philosophy is foundational for the Enlightenment in this regard. Descartes (15961650) undertakes to establish the sciences upon a secure metaphysical foundation. The famous method of doubt Descartes employs for this purpose exemplifies (in part through exaggerating) an attitude characteristic of the Enlightenment. According to Descartes, the investigator in foundational philosophical research ought to doubt all propositions that can be doubted. The investigator determines whether a proposition is dubitable by attempting to construct a possible scenario under which it is false. In the domain of fundamental scientific (philosophical) research, no other authority but one's own conviction is to be trusted, and not one's own conviction either, until it is subjected to rigorous skeptical questioning. With his method, Descartes casts doubt upon the senses as authoritative source of knowledge. He finds that God and the immaterial soul are both better known, on the basis of innate ideas, than objects of the senses. Through his famous doctrine of the dualism of mind and body, that mind and body are two distinct substances, each with its own essence, the material world (allegedly) known through the senses becomes denominated as an external world, insofar as it is external to the ideas with which one immediately communes in one's consciousness. Descartes' investigation thus establishes one of the central epistemological problems, not only of the Enlightenment, but also of modernity: the problem of objectivity in our empirical knowledge. If our evidence for the truth of propositions about extra-mental material reality is always restricted to mental content, content immediately before the mind, how can we ever be certain that the extra-mental reality is not other than we represent it as being? The solution Descartes puts forward to this problem depends on our having prior and certain knowledge of God. In fact, Descartes argues that all human knowledge (not only knowledge of the material world through the senses) depends on metaphysical knowledge of God.

However dubious Descartes' grounding of all scientific knowledge in metaphysical knowledge of God, his system contributes significantly to the advance of natural science in the period. He attacks the long-standing assumptions of the scholastic-aristotelians whose intellectual dominance stood in the way of the development of the new science; he developed a conception of matter that enabled mechanical explanation of physical phenomena; and he developed some of the fundamental mathematical resources in particular, a way to employ algebraic equations to solve geometrical problems that enabled the physical domain to be explained with precise, simple mathematical formulae. Furthermore, his grounding of physics, and all knowledge, in a relatively simple and elegant rationalist metaphysics provides a model of a rigorous and complete secular system of knowledge. Though it is typical of the Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century (for example Voltaire in his Letters on the English Nation, 1734) to embrace Newton's physical system in preference to Descartes', Newton's system itself depends on Descartes' earlier work, a dependence of which Newton himself was aware.

Cartesian philosophy is also foundational for the Enlightenment through igniting various controversies in the latter decades of the seventeenth century that provide the context of intellectual tumult out of which the Enlightenment springs. Among these controversies are the following: Are mind and body two distinct sorts of substances, as Descartes argues, and if so, what is the nature of each, and how are they related to each other, both in the human being (which presumably has both a mind and a body) and in a unified world system? If matter is inert (as Descartes claims), what can be the source of motion and the nature of causality in the physical world? And of course the various epistemological problems: the problem of objectivity, the role of God in securing our knowledge, the doctrine of innate ideas, et cetera.

Baruch Spinoza's systematic rationalist metaphysics, which he develops in his Ethics (1677) in part in response to problems in the Cartesian system, is also an important basis for Enlightenment thought. Spinoza develops, in contrast to Cartesian dualism, an ontological monism according to which there is not only one kind of substance, but one substance, God or nature, with two attributes, corresponding to mind and body. Spinoza's denial, on the basis of strict philosophical reasoning, of the existence of a transcendent supreme being, his identification of God with nature, gives strong impetus to the strands of atheism and naturalism that thread through Enlightenment philosophy. Spinoza's rationalist principles also lead him to assert a strict determinism and to deny any role to final causes or teleology in explanation. (See Israel 2001.)

The rationalist metaphysics of Leibniz (16461716) is also foundational for the Enlightenment, particularly the German Enlightenment (die Aufklrung), which is founded to a great extent on the Leibnizean rationalist system of Christian Wolff (16791754). Leibniz articulates, and places at the head of metaphysics, the great rationalist principle, the principle of sufficient reason, which states that everything that exists has a sufficient reason for its existence. This principle exemplifies the faith, so important for the Enlightenment, that the universe is fully intelligible to us through the exercise of our natural powers of reason. The problem arises, in the face of skeptical questioning, of how this principle itself can be known or grounded. Wolff attempts to derive it from the logical principle of non-contradiction (in his First Philosophy or Ontology, 1730). Criticism of this alleged derivation gives rise to the general question of how formal principles of logic can possibly serve to ground substantive knowledge of reality. Whereas Leibniz exerts his influence through scattered writings on various topics, some of which elaborate plans for a systematic metaphysics which are never executed by Leibniz himself, Wolff exerts his influence on the German Enlightenment through his development of a rationalist system of knowledge in which he attempts to demonstrate all the propositions of science from first principles, known a priori.

Wolff's rationalist metaphysics is characteristic of the Enlightenment by virtue of the pretensions of human reason within it, not by reason's success in establishing its claims. Much the same could be said of the great rationalist philosophers of the seventeenth century. Through their articulation of the ideal of scientia, of a complete science of reality, composed of propositions derived demonstratively from a priori first principles, these philosophers exert great influence on the Enlightenment. But they fail, rather spectacularly, to realize this ideal. To the contrary, what they bequeath to the eighteenth century is metaphysics, in the words of Kant, as a battlefield of endless controversies. However, the controversies themselves regarding the nature of God, mind, matter, substance, cause, et cetera, and the relations of each of these to the others provide tremendous fuel to Enlightenment thought.

Despite the confidence in and enthusiasm for human reason in the Enlightenment it is sometimes called the Age of Reason the rise of empiricism, both in the practice of science and in the theory of knowledge, is characteristic of the period. The enthusiasm for reason in the Enlightenment is not for the faculty of reason as an independent source of knowledge (at least not primarily), which is actually put on the defensive in the period, but rather for the human cognitive faculties generally; the Age of Reason contrasts with an age of religious faith, not with an age of sense experience. Of course, as outlined above, the great seventeenth century rationalist metaphysical systems of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz exert significant influence on philosophy in the Enlightenment; moreover, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment has a rationalist strain, perhaps best exemplified by the system of Christian Wolff. Still, that the Encyclopedia of Diderot and D'Alembert is dedicated to three empiricists, Francis Bacon, John Locke and Isaac Newton, indicates the general ascendency of empiricism in the period.

If the founder of the rationalist strain of the Enlightenment is Descartes, then the founder of the empiricist strain is Francis Bacon (15611626). Though Bacon's work belongs to the Renaissance, the revolution he undertook to effect in the sciences inspires and influences Enlightenment thinkers. The Enlightenment, as the age in which experimental natural science matures and comes into its own, admires Bacon as the father of experimental philosophy. Bacon's revolution (enacted in, among other works, The New Organon, 1620) involves conceiving the new science as (1) founded on empirical observation and experimentation; (2) arrived at through the method of induction; and (3) as ultimately aiming at, and as confirmed by, enhanced practical capacities (hence the Baconian motto, knowledge is power).

Though each of these elements of Bacon's revolution is significant for natural science in the Enlightenment, the point about method deserves special emphasis. Granted that Newton's work stands as the great exemplar of the accomplishments of natural science for the eighteenth century, the most salient contrast between Newton's work and that of the great rationalist systems lies in their methods. Whereas the great rationalist philosophers of the seventeenth century conceive of scientific knowledge of nature as consisting in a system in which statements expressing the observable phenomena of nature are deduced from first principles, known a priori, Newton's method begins with the observed phenomena of nature and reduces its multiplicity to unity by induction, that is, by finding mathematical laws or principles from which the observed phenomena can be derived or explained. The contrast between the great success of Newton's bottom-up procedure and the seemingly endless and fruitless conflicts among philosophers regarding the meaning and validity of first principles of reason naturally favors the rise of the Newtonian (or Baconian) method of acquiring knowledge of nature in the eighteenth century.

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Enlightenment (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)