AP Euro Enlightenment

John Locke

A physician and member of the Royal Society, set forth a theory how human beings learn and form their ideas All ideas are formed through experience

Cesar Beccaria

Famous enlightenment thinker who Believed punishments should not be exercises of brutality and was against the death penalty.

Voltaire

Real name Francois Marie Arouet.French philosopher. He believed that freedom of speech was the best weapon against bad government. He also spoke out against the corruption of the French government, and the intolerance of the Catholic Church.

Salon

Regular social gathering held by talented and rich Parisians in their homes, where philosophes and their followers met to discuss literature, science, and philosophy.

Adam Smith

Scottish philosophe who formulated laws that governed the economy to benefit human society

Enlightenment

The influential intellectual and cultural movement of the late 17th centuries that introduced a new worldview based on the use of reason, the scientific method, and progress

Rationalism

A secular, critical way of thinking in which nothing was to be accepted on faith, and everything was to be submitted to reason

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A French man who believed that Human beings are naturally good and believed all people should be free

Secular

Concerned with worldly rather than spiritual matters (nonreligious)

Barbaric

Cruel and brutal

Immanuel kant

Greatest German philosopher of Enlightenment-separated science and morality into separate branches of knowledge-science could describe nature, it could not provide a guide for morality. Wrote Critique of Pure Reason

Madame du Deffand

Hosted weekly Salons that included guests such as Montesquieu, d'Alembert, and Benjamin Franklin.

Anthropology

The study of humankind

Reading Revolution

The transition in Europe from a society where literacy consisted of patriarchal and communal reading of religious texts to a society where literacy was commonplace and reading material was broad and diverse

Carl von Linne

A Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who laid the foundations for the modern biological naming scheme of binomial nomenclature.

Philosophes

A group of French intellectuals who proclaimed that they were bringing the light of knowledge to their fellow humans in the Age of Enlightenment

Rococo

A popular style in Europe in the 18th century, known for its soft pastels, ornate interiors, sentimental portraits, and starry-eyed lovers protected by hovering cupids

David Hume

Argued that the human mind is nothing but a bundle of impressions.

Montesquieu

Created The Persian Letters, Argued for separation of powers (political power divided and shared by a variety of classes and legal estates)

Enlightened Absolutism

Term coined by historians to describe the rule of 18th-century monarchs who, without renouncing their own absolute authority, adopted Enlightenment ideals of rationalism, progress, and tolerance

Moses Mendelssohn

Was a Jewish philosopher who argued that religion should be voluntary, that secular states should promote tolerance, and that progress for everyone would come through humanitarianism.