Enlightenment
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- Catherine the Great
- Russian enlightened ruler.
- Rousseau
- Attacked many Enlightenment ideas except freedom and human rights. He was the father of the Romantic movement. He wrote The Social Contract. He taught popular sovereignty. The "general will" is not always the will of the majority.
- Philosophes
- French philosophers of the Enlightenment
- Marquis de Condorcet
- Adherent of utopianism.
- Silesia
- land in Austria fought over by Prussia.
- The Encyclopedia
- Diderot's compendium of knowledge.
- Rococo
- the new architecture and interior decorations which emphasized feminine colors—pastels, and small, delicate cupids and pictures of lovers.
- Salons
- meeting places for the spread of Enlightenment ideas.
- Madam du Chatelet
- She lived with Voltaire and helped spread his philosophy.
- Frederick the Great
- Prussian Enlightenment ruler and thinker who permitted freedom of the press.
- Joseph II
- Austrian enlightenment ruler.
- Copernican Hypothesis
- did away with crystal spherers and put the stars at rest. It did away with the Aristotelian theory.
- jean d'Alembert
- Philosopher who made a distinction between the Enlightened elite and the masses
- Newton's Synthesis
- Isaac Newton's ideas of combining the laws of Galileo and Kepler by mathematical principles.
- Junkers
- Prussian nobility.
- d'Holbach
- A later Enlightenment philosopher who spread atheism. Humans are machines and and there is no such thing as free will. His determinism resulted in no God. He wrote The System of Nature.
- Francis Bacon
- English politician and writer pushed the new scientific method. New knowledge can only be had by experiment, not Medieval speculation. He formalize the empirical method.
- Fontenelle
- the author who popularized and made simple scientific theory.
- Law of Inertia
- Galileo's formula that stated that an object in motion tends to continue that way unless some outside force stops it.
- John Locke
- Wrote Essay Concerning Human Understanding and The Second Treatise on Civil Government. He rejected Descartes who taught that everyone is born with certain ideas or tendancies. He taught that all ideas come from experiences. The environment writes all knowledge upon our minds. (The Tabula Rasa)
- Pugachev's rebellion
- a rebellion of serf's rights led by Pugachev during Catherine's reign.
- David Hume
- Protégé of d'Holbach. The human mind is nothing more than a mass of impressions.
- Law of Universal Gravitation
- every body in the universe attracts every other body in a precise mathematical way.. The force of attraction is proportionate to the size of the body.
- Reason
- the belief that nothing should be accepted by faith. All knowledge must be proved.
- Maria Theresa
- Austrian ruler and enlightened thinker.
- Pierre Bayle
- the Fr. Huguenot who hated Louis XIV. He wrote a Historical and Critical Dictionary . He taught that nothing can be known beyond doubt.
- Rene Descarte
- discovered the relationship between algebra and geometry. He doubted everything that could be doubted. He reduced everything to matter and mind. That is, all things are either physical or spiritual.
- Experimental Method
- all scientific truth must be subject to experiment and empirical principles. Inductive reasoning.
- Cartesian Dualism
- all things are either mind or matter
- Madam Geoffrin
- One of the great salon women. She was the godmother of the encyclopedia.
- Voltaire
- Chief philosophe of the Enlightenment and writer. He believed in a benevolent monarchy. He was a famous deist.
- Montesquieu
- Author of the Persian Letters, a social satire that poked fun of French society. He wrote the Spirit of the Laws a study of monarchs, despots, and republics. He taught that Parliament was a defender of democracy, and he taught the separation of powers.
- Enlightened Monarchs
- It could be absolutist, but the king had to bring new cultural ideas to Austria.
- Seven Years War
- War between Austria, France and Prussia, known as the French and Indian War.
- The Principia mathematica
- his most famous book of math and physics.
- Secularism
- the opposite of sacred. Everything about the Enlightenment was secular.