School · 1712 CE–1797 CE
Enlightenment philosophies
Enlightenment philosophies is eighteenth-century arguments about reason, science, religion, commerce, political authority, and human improvement.
Shared questions
- What authority should reason and experience have over inherited religious and political institutions?
Internal disagreements
- Whether enlightenment advances through universal reason, empirical science, commercial society, republican politics, or critical limits on each.
Key texts
- Encyclopédie · 1751–1772 — Diderot and d'Alembert's collaborative work was as much a political project as a reference book.
- The Social Contract · 1762 — Condemned on publication in both Paris and Geneva, and read in conflicting ways ever since.
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman · 1792 — Wollstonecraft wrote it in weeks, as a direct answer to the education proposals of Rousseau and Talleyrand.