Enlightenment Philosophy

Enlightenment philosophy is the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, a period of intellectual and cultural flourishing in Europe and Western civilization that emerged in the late seventeenth century in Western Europe and reached its peak in the eighteenth century. Characterized by an emphasis on reason, empirical evidence and the scientific method, it promoted ideals of individual liberty, religious tolerance, progress and natural rights, and its thinkers advocated constitutional government, the separation of church and state, and the application of rational principles to social and political reform. It emerged from and built upon the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Philosophers recorded in this atlas are grouped here when their work belongs to this movement.