Modern science, representative democracy, and a wave of wars were caused by a revolution of the intellect that seized Europe between 1600 and 1800.
The goal of these lectures is to understand the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment. You see the birth of modern thought in the dilemmas, debates, and extraordinary works of the 17th- and 18th-century mind.
You study the dominance of Aristotelean scholasticism and the assault on it in the 1600s in the work of Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, and Pascal.
You see the watershed impact of Newton and the expansion of the new philosophy in Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Hume, as well as the dissenting voice of Rousseau.