Chapter 18 - A History of World Societies Vocab

law of universal gravitation

Newton's law that all objects are attracted to one another and that the force of attraction is proportional the object's quantity of matter and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

philosophes

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

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 some external force.

empiricism

A theory of inductive reasoning that calls for acquiring evidence through observation and experimentation rather than reason and speculation.

public sphere

An idealized intellectual space that emerged in Europe during the Enlightenment. Here, the public came together to discuss important social, economic, and political issues.

Cartesian dualism

Descartes's view that all of reality could ultimately be reduced to mind and matter.

Haskalah

A Jewish Enlightenment movement led by Prussian philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.

general will

A concept associated with Rousseau, referring to the common interests of all the people, who have replaced the power of the monarch.

enlightened absolutism

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

Enlightenment

The influential intellectual and cultural movement of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that introduced new ways of thinking based on the use of reason, the scientific method, and progress.

economic liberalism

The theory that the pursuit of self-interest in a competitive market suffices to improve living conditions, rendering government intervention unnecessary and undesirable, associated with Adam Smith.

salons

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

Copernican hypothesis

The idea that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of the universe.

natural philosophy

An early modern term for the study of the nature of the universe, its purpose, and how it functioned; it encompassed what we call "science" today.

enclosure

The controversial process of fencing off common land to create privately owned fields that increased agricultural production at the cost of reducing poor farmers' access to land.