SOC 3701 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Immanuel Kant
Document Summary
9/12- lecture 2: the enlightenment and the first social theorists. A time of illumination, the age of reason . Critical use of reason to better human kind. Critique of prejudice, intolerance and superstition, challenge traditional religious views. Reason would liberate mankind from oppression, from myth, from blindness. Deists: don"t have traditional religious beliefs but believed in nature"s god , created the universe and everything in it but then left it alone. Immanuel kant (1724-1804: religion within the bounds of reason alone, morality was to be pursued by cultivating the capacity for reason instead of limiting freedom, what is enlightenment? . This question in a prussian publication, the berlin monthly, and called for responses. Many intellectuals responded, but kant"s article was the most famous : enlightenment is man"s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one"s understanding without guidance from another : have courage to use your own understanding! .
