Insight into The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was the death of secrecy and the birth of the public sphere. It was the advent of knowledge where people were allowed to express themselves more freely and share ideas amongst each other. Ideas such as freedom of speech and new forms of science and literature were prominent. Some important people involved in this movement include George Berkeley who created the theory of subjective idealism, Adam Smith who virtually created the idea of the free-market economy and wrote “The Wealth of Nations”, and Thomas Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence and later became a president of the United States.

- Dev Singh

“I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world” said Victor Frankenstein. The quote exemplifies the idea of misused knowledge which spurred Victor to create the Monster. Knowledge was very important to the enlightenment thinkers and they wanted secular knowledge and so Shelley says in this quote that the misuse of knowledge can lead to your downfall. This idea relates to the French Revolution that was sparked by the Enlightenment and led Napoleon Bonaparte to power. Shelley also states the relationship between creator and being, giving a sort of satire of God and us as we were created by God.

- Dev Singh

“I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.’ Said the Monster. This quote ties into my previous research because it precisely demonstrates to us that the Monster is an evil being worthy of no person’s affection. The hate of the world against him, The Monster does not fight back which unlike the stereotypical perception of a monster we have in our minds. In this way, we can say that The Monster has some compassion and empathy for human life even though he is so despised he wishes he were never born.

- Dev Singh

Frankenstein's inception

The basis of this article points out that Frankenstein demonstrates the basic constraints of the philosophy of the conception of the self. The novel does so by placing with in a conventional narrative that every minute detail is important for self-education when studying or reading. Shelley makes use of empiricist theory in this novel, but flip-flops in that regard as The Monster is missing vital personality traits and the lack of those traits make him out to be a monster when in fact he is human.

http://ats.coloradocollege.edu/co100-04-b1/images/7246921.pdf

- Dev Singh

People responsible for The Enlightenment

Some of the key Enlightenment thinkers were John Locke, Voltaire, and Rosseau who shared different ideas regarding the philosophy of existence and freedom, the movement of democracy, and the feminist movement. The Enlightenment arose in partially against the Church as people wanted to separate religion and politics and the discontent most people had with their lives. The French Revolution was sparked by the ideas of the Enlightenment such as Democracy which was the main cause to overthrow King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Enlightenment thinkers were obsessed over the idea of “sublime” which refers to aesthetics in the quality of transcending greatness which could be physical, moral, intellectual, or artistic.

- Dev Singh

Before Rosseau and Voltaire, France produced three influential thinkers that would also influence the enlightenment and the direction in which it carried itself. These three thinkers were Michel de Montaigne, Rene Descartes and Blaise Pascal. Michel de Montaigne was a thinker who established and believed that everyone, no matter where they were from, had their own code of morality and ethics that they followed to perfection and made everyone different and unique in comparison to one another. Because of this, no one set of codes or values should be better than any other and no one should impose on any other persons set of codes or values. Rene Descartes introduced the phrase "i think, therefore i am". This was his way of showing us all that we had the ability, reasoning and logic within us to acknowledge our existence as well as that of god with some applied mathematics as well. Finally, Blaise de Pascal was more in tune with the emotions within someone and how natural and pure they were. He didnt believe one could apply mathematics, reason and logic to areas of faith and emotion as Descartes believed. Instead, he simply said "the heart has its reasons, which reason knows not".

-franchesko

information taken from http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/examining-some-key-thinkers-of-the-enlightenment.html

Before the enlightenment, which many believe to has had its roots in the 18th century, came the renaissance. Approximately two centuries before the enlightenment, something of the same concept was occurring in Europe. Realistic thinking, changes in scientific thinking and philosophical thinking all made themselves present during the renaissance, with people like Nicholas Copernicus, who introduced the idea that the earth moved around the sun and not the other way around, which revolutionized the everyones view on astronomy. Several years later, Galileo, who we all associate with the telescope, confirmed that Copernicus had been right after performing several mathematical calculations and by using his trusty telescope. Granted, these discoveries caused tension within the church, but they also changed ways of thinking around the world; the groundwork for what was to become the enlightenment had been laid.

-Franchesko