Chapter 16
rococo
A popular style in Europe in the eighteenth century, known for its soft pastels, ornate interiors, sentimental portraits, and starry-eyed lovers protected by hovering cupids.
public sphere
An idealized intellectual space that emerged in Europe during the Enlightenment, where the public came together to discuss important issues relating to society, economics, and politics.
Enlightenment
The influential intellectual and cultural movement of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that introduced a new worldview based on the use of reason, the scientific method, and progress.
law of inertia
a law formulated by Galileo that states that motion, not rest, is the natural state of an object, and that an object continues in motion forever unless stopped by external force. This proved Aristotelian physics wrong.
natural philosophy
an early modern tern for the stud of the nature of the universe, its purpose, and how it functioned; it encompassed what we would call science today.
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.
sensationalism
the idea that all human ideas and thoughts are produced as a result of
Copernican hypothesis
the idea that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the universe.
rationalism
A secular, critical way of thinking in which nothing was to be accepted on faith, and everything was to be submitted to reason.
empiricism
A theory of inductive reasoning that calls for acquiring evidence through observation and experimentation rather than deductive reason and speculation.
deism
Belief in a distant, noninterventionist deity, common among Enlightenment thinkers.
Cartesian Dualism
Descartes's view that all of reality could ultimately be reduced to mind and matter.
law of universal gravitation
Newton's law that all objects are attracted to one another and that the force of attraction is proportional to the objects' quantity of matter and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
