Paper Topic:

philosophy

The idea that increased knowledge and human improvement go together became fundamental to the Enlightenment . Rousseau not only rejected this idea but proclaimed the opposite , stressing the simplicity of nature over the artificiality of society , feeling and faith over doubt and rationalism , and the freedom of individual genius over hard and fast aesthetic rules . In Discourse on Arts and Sciences , Rousseau affirms that sophistication has always led to moral corruption , and argues little good and moral value comes from the pursuit of art . High civilization makes societies become enfeebled sociability makes men

br false to each other and to themselves . This apparent paradox , and the rhetorical force with which Rousseau argues it , prompts dozens of refutations . In the course of replying to them , Rousseau comes to think more deeply about the causes of what he holds to be social corruption The source of evil is inequality and dependence . Man is naturally good and has only been made bad by social relations , vanity , and pride Rousseau 's philosophy expressed the negative human transformation of a positive self-love he called amour de soi ' into pride , or amour-propre ' Amour de soi represents the instictive human desire for self-preservation , combined with the human power of reason . In contrast , the unnatural and artificial amour-propre forces man to compare himself to others , thus creating unwarranted fear and allowing men to take pleasure in the pain or weakness of others . Neither this distinction between self-preservation and pride , nor the rejection of a malevolent supreme as the sole cause of human degradation originated with Rousseau his philosophy merely contributed to a wave of thought started long before

Rejecting religious dogma and superstition , thinkers of the Age of Reason ' applied a new emphasis on empiricism and rationality to their thought , like John Locke who believed in experience laid the essence to learning . Rousseau later applied Locke 's philosophy to his own creating an influential masterwork , Emile , on proper methods for educating children that included a sensuous natural upbringing . With the foundation laid by Descartes , Galileo , Copernicus , the emergence of modern science and the scientific method , the eighteenth century saw a new approach to human experience and understanding . A wave of change swept across European thinking , exemplified by the natural philosophy and scientific discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton . The publication of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica provided a provable and a coherent system of natural law that easily made useful predictions about Nature this glimpse into the cosmic rulebook set the tone of for much of what followed in the century . The idea of uniform laws for natural phenomenon mirrored the greater systematization in a variety of studies the Enlightenment saw itself as looking into the mind of God by studying creation and mining the basic truths of the world . With the concept of scriptural revelation becoming superfluous in the Enlightenment , the spirit of empirical observation encouraged the seventeenth-century natural philosophy of Benedictus de Spinoza and his Ethics , which expounded a monistic view of the universe where God and Nature were...

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