POL 3102 Lecture Notes - New Idea, Scientific Method, Main Source
11 Feb 2014
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Document Summary
The classic enlightenment metaphor: bringing light to darkness. Inspired by plato and the allegory of the cave. We can consider the enlightenment to have started in the 17th c. Traditional authority: scripture and religion was being challenged. Primary source of knowledge up to that point was the church. Religious leaders were the main source of information. The idea that divine purpose explained everything existed: the classics. The renaissance was the revival of the classics (literature, etc). Renaissance emphasized that people were going away from a wise age. How did we move from the renaissance to the enlightenment: reality --> increased optimism, new idea of the nature of man: new sense of what it means to be a human. The move to a heliocentric notion of the universe (astronomy, etc). Ie, the human being is no longer the center of the universe and that maybe the world wasn"t just created by god for human beings to enjoy.
