The Enlightenment

Catalog description

This course explores the European Enlightenment: the eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural movement that gave rise to some of the ideas that informed the American and French political revolutions at the end of the century. These included ideas of human equality and human rights, and the foundation of knowledge and authority in reason and experience rather than in religion and tradition. At the same time, Enlightenment writers also habitually ranked human beings by sex, race, and class and drew upon the European conquest and plunder of the rest of the world to frame their theories. Because of its importance and its profound contradictions, the Enlightenment has recently been the focus of much controversy. In the course, we will discuss all of this - the ideas, the contradictions, and the controversy.