David Hume
- Although he was totally into coming up with one's own thoughts, his ideas were undercutting the whole Enlightenment he was a part of.
-- To start, let's look at Hume's basic beliefs :
- One of Hume's prominent beliefs was that the human mind was made up of a bundle of impressions. These impressions, however, came from sense experience. Therefore, because our mind joins different sense experiences together, it has all these impressions inside it.
- I know, this probably isn't helpful in explaining how he undermined the Enlightenment.
So, in other words:
- Hume essentially believed that any ideas you have had to have come from senses, or something you've experienced. When you answer a question, you wouldn't be solely using reason, but rather concrete senses. So, because he was deemphasizing any role reason played in your decisions/thought, Hume undermined the whole "reason over all" idea of the Enlightenment.
- But does that mean that Hume denied reason?
-No, Hume didn't deny abstract things like reason, or freedom. He just believed in /emphasized concrete thoughts that could be proven through the senses rather than abstract feelings/ideas.
-One more thing about Hume --> did he believe in miracles?
- Yes, but not in the same way most considered what miracles are. He weighed if something was a miracle based on testimony and what has happened in nature. If the testimony was more credible than not and the event had never happened in nature, Hume believed it was a miracle.
- Hume wasn't the only philosophe though...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau , General Will, and Education
- Rousseau wrote the Social Contract where he talks about the general will. The general will reflected all common people.
-Idea wasn't the same as Hobb's Leviathan --> because Rousseau believed the people = holders of power as opposed to the monarch. Also, the will of the people was sacred, and any changes could only be made based on what the people not the monarch was saying
- Also, Rousseau believed that education was needed to teach children how to live--> idea contained in Emile
- Rousseau was also into the idea of being untouched by society as being the best route. People had to be protected from society because society ruins the person --> have to get back to nature.
That was a lot about the guys of the Enlightenment, but women played an important role too
Women and the Enlightenment
- They weren't technically allowed to participate in public intellectual settings
- Set up salons (not to be confused with ones for hair ) -->which provided social elites a place to talk about their ideas without leaders knowing
- Women ---helped spur the Enlightenment thinkers to develop their ideas further
No comments:
Post a Comment