Core Theses
Reason, not tradition or revelation, is the standard of truth.
Science reveals a lawful nature open to human understanding.
Human beings have natural rights; governments rest on consent.
Progress — in knowledge, morals, and society — is possible.
Religious toleration and freedom of thought.
The Enlightenment had many centres: Scotland (David Hume, Adam Smith), France (Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau), Germany (Immanuel Kant, Lessing), England (John Locke). Kant’s 1784 essay What Is Enlightenment? gave its motto: Sapere aude — dare to know.
Its critics came fast: the Counter-Enlightenment of Hamann and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Romanticism, and later Dostoevsky’s The Underground Man, who mocks the Crystal Palace of reason.
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John Locke
Father of British empiricism and of liberalism — the mind begins as a blank slate, and government rests on the consent of the governed.
Voltaire
The wittiest man of the Enlightenment — playwright, historian, satirist and campaigner against intolerance — whose Candide demolished Leibnizian optimism and whose cry was “Écrasez l’infâme!”
David Hume
The great Scottish sceptic who showed that causation, the self, and induction cannot be justified by reason — and that reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Genevan philosopher of nature, freedom and feeling — “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” — whose Social Contract inspired revolutionaries and whose Confessions invented modern autobiography.
Immanuel Kant
The philosopher who tried to end the war between rationalism and empiricism by asking what the mind itself contributes to experience — the “Copernican revolution” in philosophy.
Sententiae
phrases in the originalSapere aude!
Origin. Horace, Epistles I.2.40 (“dimidium facti qui coepit habet; sapere aude” — “he who has begun is half done; dare to be wise”). Kant made it the motto of the Enlightenment in “What Is Enlightenment?” (1784). — Immanuel Kant
For intellectual courage and thinking for yourself.
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsBritish Empiricism
The view that all knowledge comes from experience — the mind begins as a blank slate on which the senses write.
Rationalism vs. Empiricism
The great quarrel of early modern philosophy — does knowledge come from reason or from experience? Kant tried to end it.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Universal genius — co-inventor of calculus, philosopher of monads and pre-established harmony — who argued that ours is the best of all possible worlds.
The Categorical Imperative
Kant’s supreme principle of morality — act only on maxims you could will as universal laws; treat humanity always as an end, never merely as a means.
What Can We Know?
The relay race of epistemology — from Plato’s Cave to Kant’s categories, via Descartes’ demon and Hume’s billiard balls.
What Is Justice?
From Thrasymachus’s “advantage of the stronger” to Rawls’s veil of ignorance — the question of what we owe each other and who should rule.