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The Birth of the Modern Mind: The Intellectual History of the 17th and 18th Centuries
Revolutions in thought (as opposed to those in politics or science) are in many ways the most far-reaching of all. They affect how we grant legitimacy to authority, define what is possible, create standards of right and wrong, and even view the potential of human life. Between 1600 and 1800, such a revolution of the intellect seized Europe, shaking the minds of the continent as few things before or since. What we now know as the Enlightenment challenged previously accepted ways of understanding reality, bringing about modern science, representative democracy, and a wave of wars, sparking what Professor Kors calls, "perhaps the most profound transformation of European, if not human, life."
In this series of 24 insightful lectures, you'll explore the astonishing conceptual and cultural revolution of the Enlightenment. You'll witness in its tumultuous history the birth of modern thought in the dilemmas, debates, and extraordinary works of the 17th and 18th-century mind, as wielded by the likes of thinkers like Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Pascal, Newton, Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau.
And you'll understand why educated Europeans came to believe that they had a new understanding - of thought and the human mind, of method, of nature, and of the uses of knowledge - with which they could come to know the world correctly for the first time in human history, and with which they could rewrite the possibilities of human life.
In this series of 24 insightful lectures, you'll explore the astonishing conceptual and cultural revolution of the Enlightenment. You'll witness in its tumultuous history the birth of modern thought in the dilemmas, debates, and extraordinary works of the 17th and 18th-century mind, as wielded by the likes of thinkers like Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Pascal, Newton, Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau.
And you'll understand why educated Europeans came to believe that they had a new understanding - of thought and the human mind, of method, of nature, and of the uses of knowledge - with which they could come to know the world correctly for the first time in human history, and with which they could rewrite the possibilities of human life.
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First published January 1, 1998
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About the author
Alan Charles Kors
26 books19 followersHenry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught the intellectual history of the 17th and 18th centuries. He has received both the Lindback Foundation Award and the Ira Abrams Memorial Award for distinguished college teaching. Kors graduated A.B. summa cum laude at Princeton University in 1964, and received his M.A. (1965) and Ph.D. (1968) in European history at Harvard University.
Kors has written on the history of skeptical, atheistic, and materialist thought in 17th and 18th-century France, on the Enlightenment in general, on the history of European witchcraft beliefs, and on academic freedom. He was also the Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, which was published in four volumes by Oxford University Press in 2002.
Kors co-founded – with civil rights advocate Harvey A. Silverglate – and served from 2000 to 2006 as chairman of the board of directors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
Kors has written on the history of skeptical, atheistic, and materialist thought in 17th and 18th-century France, on the Enlightenment in general, on the history of European witchcraft beliefs, and on academic freedom. He was also the Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, which was published in four volumes by Oxford University Press in 2002.
Kors co-founded – with civil rights advocate Harvey A. Silverglate – and served from 2000 to 2006 as chairman of the board of directors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
March 23, 2017
Excellently crafted and delivered lectures. The presentation is done with exceptional clarity, and Professor Kors does his best (and succeeds imo) in presenting the various thinkers without invoking his own beliefs or viewpoints. This gives the listener a chance to try and figure things out on their own a bit, develop one's own ideas about the philosophers and thinkers. Very interesting to see how the modes of thought developed, manifested (still manifest), and influence western culture. And certain ideological battlegrounds that are still being tussled with.
A series I'll have to listen to again. The info was great, and there is so much information I'd like to go back and reexplore, there is much to think about. Recommend to anyone who might be interested in philosophy, the Enlightenment, history; but no knowledge of philosophy required. The lectures are very accessible, which is always a plus when it comes to subject matters of this type.
It's funny because so much of this material I would assume I know, or at least have had decent exposure to. But honestly in looking back my exposure was pretty superficial, and my knowledge is next to nothing. Pretty awesome getting to delve into this stuff, especially via the guidance of a lecturer of Kors' quality. He brings the times alive, and he presents the philosophers and thinkers within the context of their times, which really helps, it feels like a fair and honest treatment of the subject matter and I can't understate how much I appreciate that (and I think it is important as well). It can be incredibly easy to dismiss people or certain ideas with the hindsight of history and our analysis becomes one-dimensional. But Kors does an excellent job in showing how these thinkers operated within their times, what were the intellectual and societal contexts they were facing, etc, which allows him to paint a fuller more nuanced picture of all the characters he talks about.
Excited to read more in these arenas.
A series I'll have to listen to again. The info was great, and there is so much information I'd like to go back and reexplore, there is much to think about. Recommend to anyone who might be interested in philosophy, the Enlightenment, history; but no knowledge of philosophy required. The lectures are very accessible, which is always a plus when it comes to subject matters of this type.
It's funny because so much of this material I would assume I know, or at least have had decent exposure to. But honestly in looking back my exposure was pretty superficial, and my knowledge is next to nothing. Pretty awesome getting to delve into this stuff, especially via the guidance of a lecturer of Kors' quality. He brings the times alive, and he presents the philosophers and thinkers within the context of their times, which really helps, it feels like a fair and honest treatment of the subject matter and I can't understate how much I appreciate that (and I think it is important as well). It can be incredibly easy to dismiss people or certain ideas with the hindsight of history and our analysis becomes one-dimensional. But Kors does an excellent job in showing how these thinkers operated within their times, what were the intellectual and societal contexts they were facing, etc, which allows him to paint a fuller more nuanced picture of all the characters he talks about.
Excited to read more in these arenas.
October 29, 2019
I would say a pretty good account of the 17th and 18th centuries- but as an introduction. This has made me more curious about all those great men, especially Hobbes, Locke, Bacon, Voltaire and Rousseau, LOL, basically everyone.
April 26, 2025
3.5 stars, rounded up. This 24 lecture course is narrated by Professor Alan Charles Kors. This is my first course by this professor, although he did handle some of the courses in the multi-professor 84 lecture series on the Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition. This course covers the philosophy of the 1600-1700's, so lots on the Enlightenment thought. Professor Kors is a good speaker and does not have any distracting speech mannerisms.
The second half of the lectures were more interesting to me than the first. His early lectures on Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and Blaise Pascal were only okay. I did not have high hopes that this would be a "great" Great Course. However, once he got to John Locke and Isaac Newton, things started to pick up. Quite a few lectures towards the end went into extended detail about the differences between the Deists and the Christian though at this time period, which were very well done I thought. There are also lectures on Voltaire, David Hume, and Pierre Bayle. His lecture on Rousseau was my favorite of the whole series, as Professor Kors brought out the complexities of how all the schools of thought had influence on the prevailing world view of the time. So, I'm glad that I hung in there until the end, and picked up some valuable knowledge!
The second half of the lectures were more interesting to me than the first. His early lectures on Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and Blaise Pascal were only okay. I did not have high hopes that this would be a "great" Great Course. However, once he got to John Locke and Isaac Newton, things started to pick up. Quite a few lectures towards the end went into extended detail about the differences between the Deists and the Christian though at this time period, which were very well done I thought. There are also lectures on Voltaire, David Hume, and Pierre Bayle. His lecture on Rousseau was my favorite of the whole series, as Professor Kors brought out the complexities of how all the schools of thought had influence on the prevailing world view of the time. So, I'm glad that I hung in there until the end, and picked up some valuable knowledge!
May 21, 2015
Wonderful! I previously listened to (3x!) the course on Voltaire by the same Author/Lecturer, Alan Charles Kors, and loved it so much, that I recently bought this course to enjoy more of Kors' insights and hearing him bring this fascinating and compelling history and it's crucial ideas to life! I was just as impressed with this course as I was for the Voltaire course.
From the opening remarks about what the course is about and the importance of intellectual history to the monumental pathbreaking work of Francis Bacon, I'm loving this. The mindset of the late 16th century Europe to the incredibly radical ideas of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes are clearly and passionately explained. This course fills in many gaps in my education as well as really bringing alive the great ideas that helped set Europe free from the chains of stultifying norms and restraints on free thought.
The lecture on Pascal was fascinating. The lecture on Newton, stupendous. What an incredibly gripping story. So much of this is actually new to me, even though I have read about and admired so many of these thinkers for many, many years. Never has the story of the thinkers and their ideas been presented so compellingly as here, for me.
Additional highlights for me were the talks on Deism, Montesquieu, the French Enlightenment, Voltaire (even though I heard the whole course on him previously), Beccaria- totally new to me, and now I really wonder why, and even JJ Rousseau, who, though despicable, was portrayed objectively and as the HUGE force in history, still playing a big part today. I even learned of some positive ideas which he came up with on education, a great example of the truth that even some of the worst thinkers are almost never 100% terrible.
Professor Kors is such a wonderful and inspiring guide to the 17th and 18th Centuries geniuses, the milieu, the ideas and their world changing repercussions. What more could anyone want?
From the opening remarks about what the course is about and the importance of intellectual history to the monumental pathbreaking work of Francis Bacon, I'm loving this. The mindset of the late 16th century Europe to the incredibly radical ideas of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes are clearly and passionately explained. This course fills in many gaps in my education as well as really bringing alive the great ideas that helped set Europe free from the chains of stultifying norms and restraints on free thought.
The lecture on Pascal was fascinating. The lecture on Newton, stupendous. What an incredibly gripping story. So much of this is actually new to me, even though I have read about and admired so many of these thinkers for many, many years. Never has the story of the thinkers and their ideas been presented so compellingly as here, for me.
Additional highlights for me were the talks on Deism, Montesquieu, the French Enlightenment, Voltaire (even though I heard the whole course on him previously), Beccaria- totally new to me, and now I really wonder why, and even JJ Rousseau, who, though despicable, was portrayed objectively and as the HUGE force in history, still playing a big part today. I even learned of some positive ideas which he came up with on education, a great example of the truth that even some of the worst thinkers are almost never 100% terrible.
Professor Kors is such a wonderful and inspiring guide to the 17th and 18th Centuries geniuses, the milieu, the ideas and their world changing repercussions. What more could anyone want?
December 16, 2019
Both fascinant and scary.
The professor is very talented at conveying complex notions simply and briefly.
The professor is very talented at conveying complex notions simply and briefly.
July 18, 2023
This series of 24 lectures on the Enlightenment by Prof. Kors is informative and entertaining (if you’re a geek) but leads one to question whether mankind reached its pinnacle of reason during that period, not to be exceeded in our own time. Our greatest advancements seem to be based on the foundation built by the likes of Voltaire and his contemporaries, and yet that foundation is still not one that all people occupy today (or so it appears most days). Voltaire predicted this: “There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.” He also observed what is true today, “Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others, to persecute those who do reason.”
May 6, 2025
When the 17th century dawned in Europe, the world of learning and formal understanding was dominated by a belief in the presumptive authority of those past authors who had stood the test of time and in the system of thought—Aristotelian scholasticism—that had emerged from the fusion of those authorities and Christian doctrine.
A series of fundamental assaults upon the inherited intellectual system dominated the intellectual life of the 17th century, just as the combined effects of growth in education and printing dramatically expanded the size and opportunities of the reading public. Those assaults constituted nothing less than a conceptual revolution among students of natural philosophy (the study of natural things by the natural mind), a revolution that altered the European relationship to thought, nature, and human possibility. In the 18th century, that conceptual revolution—associated most clearly with what we now term the "scientific revolution," but which was a transformation of all aspects of human inquiry and understanding—was popularized, translated into new media, and extended to areas of nature and human activity beyond those imagined by most 17th century thinkers. By the end of the 18th century, the prestige of ancient thought and of the inherited system was a thing of the past. Educated Europeans believed that they had a new understanding— of thought and the human mind, of method, of nature, and of the uses of knowledge with which they could come to know the world correctly for the first time in human history and with which they could rewrite the possibilities of human life. … The broad themes of the 17th century's intellectual revolution involved a rejection of the presumptive authority of the past in general and a diverse set of furious assaults upon the inherited Aristotelian synthesis in particular. … These new systems and outlooks included empiricism, experimentalism, rationalism, quantification of nature, mechanism, skepticism about philosophy and certainty, and the radical separation of theology and natural inquiry. … The intellectual revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries was far more profound in its consequences for the human condition than any political of social revolution of the early modern period, and itself contributed crucially to revolutions in European life. If a culture changes the way it thinks about truth, nature, the knowable, the possible and impossible, and the causes of things, it will alter its expectations and behavior in almost all areas of human life. If a culture changes the way it thinks about using mind properly, it changes the way that it thinks about almost everything.
LECTURE 1
Introduction—Intellectual History and Conceptual Change
LECTURE 2
The Dawn of the 17th Century—Aristotelian Scholasticism
In the educated world, that intellectual inheritance was a fusion of Aristotelian (and other Greek) philosophy and of Christian theology; it was known as "scholasticism" or, more precisely, as Aristotelian scholasticism. Its means of teaching and persuasion was the disputatio (disputation), based upon (in order of importance) intellectual authorities, logical deduction from these authorities, and the appearances of the world. This system dominated the universities and schools of Europe. Thinkers believed that it brought coherence to the world, explaining the nature of all things in terms of their "material, formal, efficient, and final causes." By distinguishing among all beings in terms of the degrees of their "perfections," scholasticism created a "great chain of being" that permitted us to know contemplatively the value of all things. The science of final causes (teleology) permitted us to know contemplatively the purposes of things, and to grasp how, under God's design, all things strove for God's created order. The 17th century marked a momentous assault upon all aspects of the Aristotelian scholastic synthesis.
In such a system, what should a mind capable of study know? It should have a deep knowledge of the system as a whole and its lessons. It should have knowledge of perfections and purposes, above all, contemplative classification yielding wisdom of God's creation and of our place in it. It should dwell on higher, not lower, things. This is the system that had emerged officially triumphant after all the intellectual wars of the Renaissance and the 16th century, enshrined in the official curricula of the secondary schools and universities of Western Europe.
LECTURE 3
The New Vision of Francis Bacon
LECTURE 4
The New Astronomy and Cosmology
LECTURE 5
Descartes's Dream of Perfect Knowledge
LECTURE 6
The Specter of Thomas Hobbes
We are matter in motion according to the fixed laws of mechanics. There is no such thing as ‘free will.’ The governing mechanisms are pleasure and pain. All organisms seek what they believe will cause pleasure and flee what they believe will cause pain. Opinion rules the world.
LECTURE 7
Skepticism and Jansenism—Blaise Pascal
LECTURE 8
Newton's Discovery
LECTURE 9
The Newtonian Revolution
LECTURE 10
John Locke—The Revolution in Knowledge
LECTURE 11
The Lockean Moment
If, as Locke taught, one's knowledge, beliefs, and moral ideas are bounded and determined by one's experience, then it follows absolutely that one's sense of the world, one's values, and one's beliefs about things are relative to time, place, and personal experience.
LECTURE 12
Skepticism and Calvinism—Pierre Bayle
LECTURE 13
The Moderns—The Generation of 1680-1715
The generation of 1680 to 1715 increasingly rejected the presumptive authority of the past, and increasingly recognized the rights of natural reason even in the presence of theological authority. It increasingly believed induction from data, not deduction from inherited premises, to be the path toward truth. Rather than relying on syllogistic deduction from premises drawn from authority, it relied on induction—the logic of inference from experience. And it made the systematic inquiry into experience, now seen as "the book of nature," the heart of natural philosophy. Further, the rejection of the presumptive authority of the past in natural philosophy led quite naturally to a rejection of the presumptive authority of the past in general. Europe possessed a growing sense that it had acquired something unique from 17th century thinkers—proper method—that would alter both knowledge and the human relationship to nature.
What aspects of 17"-century thought provided the foundation for the early 18-century generation of thinkers?
From Bacon they took learning from nature and the rejection of the received authority of the past. They learned to reject the Idols of the Theater: automatic deference to received authorities. From Bacon they took induction and the essentiality of method (the metaphor of the path) without reference to theology. They also took the view of knowledge as human power to enhance human well-being and reduce suffering.
From Descartes they took the rights of reason. They emphasized the right of philosophy to begin in doubt: believe nothing, absent rational conviction. They also derived from Descartes the quest for order and clarity: the desire to understand the world. They also appropriated Descartes' belief in the human ability to understand the mechanisms by which the natural order is governed.
From Galileo they took the freedom of natural philosophy. They looked to nature rather than to human books. Their view of nature was mathematized.
From Locke they took his claim that all knowledge arises from and is bounded in experience. They also appropriated his admission of ignorance on matters beyond experience. They adhered to his view that all knowledge is constructed from confirmable units of simple experience, and that all claims of truth may be examined in such a light.
From Newton they took the belief that nature was lawful in design and that the human mind could understand these laws. With an understanding of three laws of motion and the law of gravity, both celestial and terrestrial physics fall into place. Nature is lawful and designed: we see through nature to Nature's God.
LECTURE 14
Introduction to Deism
The deists embody a striking hatred of the Christian clergy and their role, and a contempt for the Judeo-Christian portrayal of God in Scripture. God, for the deists, has revealed Himself to us in nature. Mankind, from God's loving creation, is self-sufficient. We have been deprived of this knowledge by those who deny reason, the natural faculties and inclinations, and who deny the natural right and moral criterion, from God, of human happiness in this natural world—in short, by the Christians.
LECTURE 15
The Conflict Between Deism and Christianity
LECTURE 16
Montesquieu and the Problem of Relativism
LECTURE 17
Voltaire Bringing England to France
LECTURE 18
Bishop Joseph Butler and God's Providence
Increasingly, 17th century thinkers saw the ordered laws of nature as the instruments of God's will, wisdom, and purpose. The discoveries of 17th century natural philosophy (science) produced a sense of touching the order and providence of God. The new philosophers saw themselves as profoundly pious minds who had chosen to learn God's designs and purposeful intelligence from what God actually had created. The new science produced a sense of religious awe in locating God's providence in natural mechanisms themselves. Following the empirically discernible laws of nature meant following the laws of God.
This perception validated physical and secular pleasure as the happiness we had the right, from God, to seek. Christian theology distinguished between beatitudo (beatitude blessed reunion with God in life everlasting) and felicitas (earthly happiness). Christian moral theologians long taught that the latter was a fallen, corrupted remnant of the highest calling to pursue beatitude.
In light of the new philosophy of the 17th century, earthly happiness acquired validation. If the laws and mechanisms of nature were the agencies of divine intention, and if it were a law of nature and a governing mechanism that human beings and all other living creatures sought earthly pleasure and fled earthly pain, then it followed that the pursuit of such pleasure was the divinely ordained end of human life. The pursuit of happiness was what God himself had chosen for us and had joined to the good.
Bishop Joseph Butler, the leading moral theologian of the Church of England, used the essentialistic model of human nature in his celebrated Fifteen Sermons on Humane Nature to argue that before and independent of Christian revelation, our natural knowledge and the ordinary tendencies of our human nature lead us to virtue. We must examine and analyze our purposeful design in order to know our nature. Our essence is to pursue happiness, governed naturally by reason and conscience.
Given the reality of divine design, we know that the pursuit of secular happiness, to which our nature impels us, leads us—when we are govemed by reason and conscience to the good. Against Calvin and Hobbes, he argues that self-love is good and that benevolence and self-love are not in conflict. We must love ourselves if we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. To say that we should not seek our happiness in this secular, natural world was to criticize the very design of God. There is no inconsistency whatsoever between moral duty and self-love or self-interest. If it is a law of nature that we were creatures of self-love in pursuit of happiness, then happiness is our literal, God-given birthright and coincident with virtue.
It was but a small step from Bishop Butler to the deism of Thomas Jefferson, who indeed could assert that it was self-evident that all human beings were endowed by their Creator with the unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness.
LECTURE 19
The Skeptical Challenge to Optimism—David Hume
LECTURE 20
The Assault upon Philosophical Optimism—Voltaire
LECTURE 21
The Philosophes—The Triumph of the French Enlightenment
This generation thought of itself as leading humanity into a new relationship with nature and with natural human society. Empirically derived knowledge would be applied toward the reduction of human suffering and the increase of human well-being. They redefined the meaning of "philosopher" and appropriated the name "les philosophes."
They coalesced around certain institutions cafes, salons, patrons, academies and certain ideas. They rejected inherited authority per se. They were committed, in theory at least, to empirical evidence, rational analysis, and the belief that nature was our sole source of knowledge and values.
They shared the ethical principle of utility: the view that the happiness of the species is the highest value, and that all things may be judged by their contribution either to happiness or to suffering.
Enlightenment thinkers entered into fundamental conflict with the Roman Catholic Church in France. Most were deists and held that God spoke to mankind through nature alone, and that the priests had usurped and falsified God's voice in sectarian religions. Their argument with the Church centered on the critical issue of tolerance and censorship. It centered on differing histories and analyses of their societies. They debated over the status of traditional authority and supernatural claims. They argued over the priority of secular over religious concerns. Both the philosophes and the churchmen regarded each other as their deepest foe.
LECTURE 22
Beccaria and Enlightened Reform
LECTURE 23
Rousseau's Dissent
LECTURE 24
Materialism and Naturalism—The Boundaries of the Enlightenment
La Mettrie and the emergence of explicit materialistic naturalism in the French Enlightenment. He was not admired by later French materialists, since he identified sensual pleasure as the ultimate good.
Denis Diderot's relationship to Enlightenment atheism. D'Holbach's circle included Diderot and Naigeon. Diderot's atheistic works were published only after his death, although his salons had been preoccupied with his atheist theses. Diderot's work displays the following naturalistic themes. The crucial issue is the existence or non-existence of God.
All matter (all nature) is potentially alive. There is no categorical distinction between the organic and inorganic. Physical behavior depends upon organization and catalysts. Time and purely natural agencies transform the living into inorganic and the inorganic into the living. Life and death are two modes of the same matter. The hypothesis of God explains nothing, confuses much, and is unnecessary.
Diderot offers proto-evolutionary speculations on the transformation of the species over time, the survival of the best adapted, the scientific need to abandon the limitations of Scriptural time, and the cells as carriers of the information of each organism. Human thought is a scientific, not a theological, mystery.
Diderot squarely faces the ethical implications of atheistic naturalism. Ethics as behavior is partly inherited, partly learned. The goal of ethics is survival and better interaction with nature and ourselves. The only ethical criteria are pleasure and utility. For Diderot, atheism is proper humility. Atheism is the ultimate humanism.
Naturalism is the ultimate overthrow of the Aristotelian scholastic system. Naturalism asks to be judged less on philosophical than on historical grounds. In an unplanned universe that does not care for us, there exists the need to coexist with nature and with each other and to build human well-being. The debates of the modern age begin in all of their intensity.
A series of fundamental assaults upon the inherited intellectual system dominated the intellectual life of the 17th century, just as the combined effects of growth in education and printing dramatically expanded the size and opportunities of the reading public. Those assaults constituted nothing less than a conceptual revolution among students of natural philosophy (the study of natural things by the natural mind), a revolution that altered the European relationship to thought, nature, and human possibility. In the 18th century, that conceptual revolution—associated most clearly with what we now term the "scientific revolution," but which was a transformation of all aspects of human inquiry and understanding—was popularized, translated into new media, and extended to areas of nature and human activity beyond those imagined by most 17th century thinkers. By the end of the 18th century, the prestige of ancient thought and of the inherited system was a thing of the past. Educated Europeans believed that they had a new understanding— of thought and the human mind, of method, of nature, and of the uses of knowledge with which they could come to know the world correctly for the first time in human history and with which they could rewrite the possibilities of human life. … The broad themes of the 17th century's intellectual revolution involved a rejection of the presumptive authority of the past in general and a diverse set of furious assaults upon the inherited Aristotelian synthesis in particular. … These new systems and outlooks included empiricism, experimentalism, rationalism, quantification of nature, mechanism, skepticism about philosophy and certainty, and the radical separation of theology and natural inquiry. … The intellectual revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries was far more profound in its consequences for the human condition than any political of social revolution of the early modern period, and itself contributed crucially to revolutions in European life. If a culture changes the way it thinks about truth, nature, the knowable, the possible and impossible, and the causes of things, it will alter its expectations and behavior in almost all areas of human life. If a culture changes the way it thinks about using mind properly, it changes the way that it thinks about almost everything.
LECTURE 1
Introduction—Intellectual History and Conceptual Change
LECTURE 2
The Dawn of the 17th Century—Aristotelian Scholasticism
In the educated world, that intellectual inheritance was a fusion of Aristotelian (and other Greek) philosophy and of Christian theology; it was known as "scholasticism" or, more precisely, as Aristotelian scholasticism. Its means of teaching and persuasion was the disputatio (disputation), based upon (in order of importance) intellectual authorities, logical deduction from these authorities, and the appearances of the world. This system dominated the universities and schools of Europe. Thinkers believed that it brought coherence to the world, explaining the nature of all things in terms of their "material, formal, efficient, and final causes." By distinguishing among all beings in terms of the degrees of their "perfections," scholasticism created a "great chain of being" that permitted us to know contemplatively the value of all things. The science of final causes (teleology) permitted us to know contemplatively the purposes of things, and to grasp how, under God's design, all things strove for God's created order. The 17th century marked a momentous assault upon all aspects of the Aristotelian scholastic synthesis.
In such a system, what should a mind capable of study know? It should have a deep knowledge of the system as a whole and its lessons. It should have knowledge of perfections and purposes, above all, contemplative classification yielding wisdom of God's creation and of our place in it. It should dwell on higher, not lower, things. This is the system that had emerged officially triumphant after all the intellectual wars of the Renaissance and the 16th century, enshrined in the official curricula of the secondary schools and universities of Western Europe.
LECTURE 3
The New Vision of Francis Bacon
LECTURE 4
The New Astronomy and Cosmology
LECTURE 5
Descartes's Dream of Perfect Knowledge
LECTURE 6
The Specter of Thomas Hobbes
We are matter in motion according to the fixed laws of mechanics. There is no such thing as ‘free will.’ The governing mechanisms are pleasure and pain. All organisms seek what they believe will cause pleasure and flee what they believe will cause pain. Opinion rules the world.
LECTURE 7
Skepticism and Jansenism—Blaise Pascal
LECTURE 8
Newton's Discovery
LECTURE 9
The Newtonian Revolution
LECTURE 10
John Locke—The Revolution in Knowledge
LECTURE 11
The Lockean Moment
If, as Locke taught, one's knowledge, beliefs, and moral ideas are bounded and determined by one's experience, then it follows absolutely that one's sense of the world, one's values, and one's beliefs about things are relative to time, place, and personal experience.
LECTURE 12
Skepticism and Calvinism—Pierre Bayle
LECTURE 13
The Moderns—The Generation of 1680-1715
The generation of 1680 to 1715 increasingly rejected the presumptive authority of the past, and increasingly recognized the rights of natural reason even in the presence of theological authority. It increasingly believed induction from data, not deduction from inherited premises, to be the path toward truth. Rather than relying on syllogistic deduction from premises drawn from authority, it relied on induction—the logic of inference from experience. And it made the systematic inquiry into experience, now seen as "the book of nature," the heart of natural philosophy. Further, the rejection of the presumptive authority of the past in natural philosophy led quite naturally to a rejection of the presumptive authority of the past in general. Europe possessed a growing sense that it had acquired something unique from 17th century thinkers—proper method—that would alter both knowledge and the human relationship to nature.
What aspects of 17"-century thought provided the foundation for the early 18-century generation of thinkers?
From Bacon they took learning from nature and the rejection of the received authority of the past. They learned to reject the Idols of the Theater: automatic deference to received authorities. From Bacon they took induction and the essentiality of method (the metaphor of the path) without reference to theology. They also took the view of knowledge as human power to enhance human well-being and reduce suffering.
From Descartes they took the rights of reason. They emphasized the right of philosophy to begin in doubt: believe nothing, absent rational conviction. They also derived from Descartes the quest for order and clarity: the desire to understand the world. They also appropriated Descartes' belief in the human ability to understand the mechanisms by which the natural order is governed.
From Galileo they took the freedom of natural philosophy. They looked to nature rather than to human books. Their view of nature was mathematized.
From Locke they took his claim that all knowledge arises from and is bounded in experience. They also appropriated his admission of ignorance on matters beyond experience. They adhered to his view that all knowledge is constructed from confirmable units of simple experience, and that all claims of truth may be examined in such a light.
From Newton they took the belief that nature was lawful in design and that the human mind could understand these laws. With an understanding of three laws of motion and the law of gravity, both celestial and terrestrial physics fall into place. Nature is lawful and designed: we see through nature to Nature's God.
LECTURE 14
Introduction to Deism
The deists embody a striking hatred of the Christian clergy and their role, and a contempt for the Judeo-Christian portrayal of God in Scripture. God, for the deists, has revealed Himself to us in nature. Mankind, from God's loving creation, is self-sufficient. We have been deprived of this knowledge by those who deny reason, the natural faculties and inclinations, and who deny the natural right and moral criterion, from God, of human happiness in this natural world—in short, by the Christians.
LECTURE 15
The Conflict Between Deism and Christianity
LECTURE 16
Montesquieu and the Problem of Relativism
LECTURE 17
Voltaire Bringing England to France
LECTURE 18
Bishop Joseph Butler and God's Providence
Increasingly, 17th century thinkers saw the ordered laws of nature as the instruments of God's will, wisdom, and purpose. The discoveries of 17th century natural philosophy (science) produced a sense of touching the order and providence of God. The new philosophers saw themselves as profoundly pious minds who had chosen to learn God's designs and purposeful intelligence from what God actually had created. The new science produced a sense of religious awe in locating God's providence in natural mechanisms themselves. Following the empirically discernible laws of nature meant following the laws of God.
This perception validated physical and secular pleasure as the happiness we had the right, from God, to seek. Christian theology distinguished between beatitudo (beatitude blessed reunion with God in life everlasting) and felicitas (earthly happiness). Christian moral theologians long taught that the latter was a fallen, corrupted remnant of the highest calling to pursue beatitude.
In light of the new philosophy of the 17th century, earthly happiness acquired validation. If the laws and mechanisms of nature were the agencies of divine intention, and if it were a law of nature and a governing mechanism that human beings and all other living creatures sought earthly pleasure and fled earthly pain, then it followed that the pursuit of such pleasure was the divinely ordained end of human life. The pursuit of happiness was what God himself had chosen for us and had joined to the good.
Bishop Joseph Butler, the leading moral theologian of the Church of England, used the essentialistic model of human nature in his celebrated Fifteen Sermons on Humane Nature to argue that before and independent of Christian revelation, our natural knowledge and the ordinary tendencies of our human nature lead us to virtue. We must examine and analyze our purposeful design in order to know our nature. Our essence is to pursue happiness, governed naturally by reason and conscience.
Given the reality of divine design, we know that the pursuit of secular happiness, to which our nature impels us, leads us—when we are govemed by reason and conscience to the good. Against Calvin and Hobbes, he argues that self-love is good and that benevolence and self-love are not in conflict. We must love ourselves if we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. To say that we should not seek our happiness in this secular, natural world was to criticize the very design of God. There is no inconsistency whatsoever between moral duty and self-love or self-interest. If it is a law of nature that we were creatures of self-love in pursuit of happiness, then happiness is our literal, God-given birthright and coincident with virtue.
It was but a small step from Bishop Butler to the deism of Thomas Jefferson, who indeed could assert that it was self-evident that all human beings were endowed by their Creator with the unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness.
LECTURE 19
The Skeptical Challenge to Optimism—David Hume
LECTURE 20
The Assault upon Philosophical Optimism—Voltaire
LECTURE 21
The Philosophes—The Triumph of the French Enlightenment
This generation thought of itself as leading humanity into a new relationship with nature and with natural human society. Empirically derived knowledge would be applied toward the reduction of human suffering and the increase of human well-being. They redefined the meaning of "philosopher" and appropriated the name "les philosophes."
They coalesced around certain institutions cafes, salons, patrons, academies and certain ideas. They rejected inherited authority per se. They were committed, in theory at least, to empirical evidence, rational analysis, and the belief that nature was our sole source of knowledge and values.
They shared the ethical principle of utility: the view that the happiness of the species is the highest value, and that all things may be judged by their contribution either to happiness or to suffering.
Enlightenment thinkers entered into fundamental conflict with the Roman Catholic Church in France. Most were deists and held that God spoke to mankind through nature alone, and that the priests had usurped and falsified God's voice in sectarian religions. Their argument with the Church centered on the critical issue of tolerance and censorship. It centered on differing histories and analyses of their societies. They debated over the status of traditional authority and supernatural claims. They argued over the priority of secular over religious concerns. Both the philosophes and the churchmen regarded each other as their deepest foe.
LECTURE 22
Beccaria and Enlightened Reform
LECTURE 23
Rousseau's Dissent
LECTURE 24
Materialism and Naturalism—The Boundaries of the Enlightenment
La Mettrie and the emergence of explicit materialistic naturalism in the French Enlightenment. He was not admired by later French materialists, since he identified sensual pleasure as the ultimate good.
Denis Diderot's relationship to Enlightenment atheism. D'Holbach's circle included Diderot and Naigeon. Diderot's atheistic works were published only after his death, although his salons had been preoccupied with his atheist theses. Diderot's work displays the following naturalistic themes. The crucial issue is the existence or non-existence of God.
All matter (all nature) is potentially alive. There is no categorical distinction between the organic and inorganic. Physical behavior depends upon organization and catalysts. Time and purely natural agencies transform the living into inorganic and the inorganic into the living. Life and death are two modes of the same matter. The hypothesis of God explains nothing, confuses much, and is unnecessary.
Diderot offers proto-evolutionary speculations on the transformation of the species over time, the survival of the best adapted, the scientific need to abandon the limitations of Scriptural time, and the cells as carriers of the information of each organism. Human thought is a scientific, not a theological, mystery.
Diderot squarely faces the ethical implications of atheistic naturalism. Ethics as behavior is partly inherited, partly learned. The goal of ethics is survival and better interaction with nature and ourselves. The only ethical criteria are pleasure and utility. For Diderot, atheism is proper humility. Atheism is the ultimate humanism.
Naturalism is the ultimate overthrow of the Aristotelian scholastic system. Naturalism asks to be judged less on philosophical than on historical grounds. In an unplanned universe that does not care for us, there exists the need to coexist with nature and with each other and to build human well-being. The debates of the modern age begin in all of their intensity.
September 1, 2019
The Birth Of The Modern Mind: The Intellectual History Of The 17th And 18th Centuries
by Alan Charles Kors
This is a “great courses” course, containing 24 lectures. For a detailed outline and review, see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The book reviews the intellectual history of the 1600s and 1700s. It is divided into two parts for the two centuries. Each lecture profiles a thinker or a school of thinker. In my understanding from the book, the development of the thoughts in this period follows the backdrop of the scientific revolution.
The scientific revolution started with Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. In terms of intellectual history, scientific revolution in the 1600s altered our world view from the Greeks classical school (Aristotle) in two ways. First, we expect scientific theories to be able to predict our observations quantitatively. This is different from the Greek’s descriptions that are vague and “high-principled,” yet offering few verifiable predictions. Second, instead of following Plato’s view that the real world is an imperfect projection of the perfect rational ideals, we see that natural laws are elegant and beautiful. There is perfection in astronomy and mechanics.
A significant impact of scientific revolution is on epistemology (the theory of knowledge). Instead of viewing the “ideal” or the “light from God” as the source of knowledge, we search for knowledge from our mind and experiences. Bacon started the trend by establishing the inductive methodology, which distills theories from observations and experiences. Later on the rationalists (Descartes) and empiricists (Locke and Hume) push to the extremes by relying only on reasoning or on sensory input. A compromise was reached later that says we should combine reason with experiences to form an understanding of the world.
The second thread of intellectual history is our relationship with God. This can be further divided into two questions. The first is the relationship between God and the natural world. Development of the scientific theories suggests that nature works according some eternal laws and without God’s intervention. So God’s ramification in the natural world is its creation and the perfect laws that it follows, instead of in its day-to-day operations. The second question is the relationship between God and human society. Why does God create or tolerate a society that is imperfect and filled with injustice and suffering? Such question lead to skepticism against God, and explanations that view our society and a necessary cost for the free will that God grants human. Anyway, these questions interact with social movements and lead to materialism, which does not believe anything (including God) other than the physical reality.
The professor recounts the various thoughts and life stories of the thinkers eloquently. However, his lectures are more rhetoric than descriptive. Such style leads to repetitions and confusions. While each sentence is powerful to hear, it is difficult to see the underlying organization and outline. Often, it is hard to tell whether he is introducing a new point, expanding on an old point, or merely restating the point in a different way.
There are also some (perhaps inevitable) omissions, in my view. For example, Kant spent most of his life in the 1700s. But he was not mentioned in the lectures. In addition to its quantitative descriptions of the natural laws, another essential characteristic of modern science is its experimental methods. Galileo and Newton not only conducted quantitative observations of the universe, they also engage in controlled experiments to verify their theories in mechanics and optics. Such practice also has a substantial impact on epistemology: people actively interact with the world to gain understanding. This part of the science was not discussed in the lectures as well.
Overall, this is useful teaching of intellectual history. But it should not serve as the only textbook on the subject.
by Alan Charles Kors
This is a “great courses” course, containing 24 lectures. For a detailed outline and review, see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The book reviews the intellectual history of the 1600s and 1700s. It is divided into two parts for the two centuries. Each lecture profiles a thinker or a school of thinker. In my understanding from the book, the development of the thoughts in this period follows the backdrop of the scientific revolution.
The scientific revolution started with Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. In terms of intellectual history, scientific revolution in the 1600s altered our world view from the Greeks classical school (Aristotle) in two ways. First, we expect scientific theories to be able to predict our observations quantitatively. This is different from the Greek’s descriptions that are vague and “high-principled,” yet offering few verifiable predictions. Second, instead of following Plato’s view that the real world is an imperfect projection of the perfect rational ideals, we see that natural laws are elegant and beautiful. There is perfection in astronomy and mechanics.
A significant impact of scientific revolution is on epistemology (the theory of knowledge). Instead of viewing the “ideal” or the “light from God” as the source of knowledge, we search for knowledge from our mind and experiences. Bacon started the trend by establishing the inductive methodology, which distills theories from observations and experiences. Later on the rationalists (Descartes) and empiricists (Locke and Hume) push to the extremes by relying only on reasoning or on sensory input. A compromise was reached later that says we should combine reason with experiences to form an understanding of the world.
The second thread of intellectual history is our relationship with God. This can be further divided into two questions. The first is the relationship between God and the natural world. Development of the scientific theories suggests that nature works according some eternal laws and without God’s intervention. So God’s ramification in the natural world is its creation and the perfect laws that it follows, instead of in its day-to-day operations. The second question is the relationship between God and human society. Why does God create or tolerate a society that is imperfect and filled with injustice and suffering? Such question lead to skepticism against God, and explanations that view our society and a necessary cost for the free will that God grants human. Anyway, these questions interact with social movements and lead to materialism, which does not believe anything (including God) other than the physical reality.
The professor recounts the various thoughts and life stories of the thinkers eloquently. However, his lectures are more rhetoric than descriptive. Such style leads to repetitions and confusions. While each sentence is powerful to hear, it is difficult to see the underlying organization and outline. Often, it is hard to tell whether he is introducing a new point, expanding on an old point, or merely restating the point in a different way.
There are also some (perhaps inevitable) omissions, in my view. For example, Kant spent most of his life in the 1700s. But he was not mentioned in the lectures. In addition to its quantitative descriptions of the natural laws, another essential characteristic of modern science is its experimental methods. Galileo and Newton not only conducted quantitative observations of the universe, they also engage in controlled experiments to verify their theories in mechanics and optics. Such practice also has a substantial impact on epistemology: people actively interact with the world to gain understanding. This part of the science was not discussed in the lectures as well.
Overall, this is useful teaching of intellectual history. But it should not serve as the only textbook on the subject.
November 8, 2018
Part One:
I must admit that I am fond of intellectual history, in part because I have pretty strong intellectual interests in general as well as with regards to history and in part because the field is so obscure. When we look at the world of ideas, if we do, we will notice that ideas and worldviews have a history. This comes as a surprise to many people because when we are living in a particular place and time, the commonplace truths of the contemporary age appear to be so obviously true that we do not stop to examine their history and context. When we do, as the professor of this course does, we get something that is remarkable and enjoyable and somewhat rare, in that the author takes ideas seriously and wishes to present the various thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as people seriously interested in the issues of their time and influenced by their own personal context and what they knew of the past. Some of these thinkers are easier to like in the present-day, and some of them have been nearly forgotten, but this professor gives them all their due, and that is certainly admirable, whatever his own views happen to be.
The twelve lectures over six hours in this part of the course are divided so that they cover a wide variety of thinkers, mostly in the 1600's. The professor begins with a discussion of intellectual history as a discipline and the process and nature of conceptual change over time (1). After this the author looks at the worldview that was dominant in the western intellectual world at the beginning of the 17th century, namely Aristotelian scholasticism (2). After this introductory material to set the context, the author discusses the new vision of Francis Bacon (3), the new astronomy and cosmology that legitimized a new view of science and philosophy (4), and Descartes' dream of perfect knowledge (5). After that comes a look at the specter of Thomas Hobbes (6), the combination of skepticism and Jansenism that led to the fideism of Blaise Pascal (7), a couple of lectures of Newton's discovery (8) and the revolution in thought that came about because of his writings (9). After that the first part concludes with lectures on John Locke's thinking (10) and his massive influence on his times (11) as well as the skepticism and Calvinism and fideism of the largely forgotten Pierre Bayle (12).
There are a few threads that connect the various thinkers discussed in these lectures. For one, all of them were strongly influenced by the political, religious, and intellectual issues of their days. This included the rise of absolutist monarchs in France, the fallout from the Protestant Reformation, the political turmoil in places like England and Germany, the struggle for religious liberty for minorities, the repercussions of the Copernican theory, and the degree in which human beings could be confident in their rational capacities. The complexities and cross-currents of the time meant that people were often involved in many aspects of the issues of their time--Newton wrote extensively on faith as well as mathematics, Locke was involved in practical politics as well as educational and political theory, and Bayle's skeptical writing was done in part in an attempt to convince the French monarchy that Protestants were not disloyal citizens, so that he and his co-religionists could return home from exile. The author does a good job presenting a nuanced understanding of a variety of important thinkers based on their own context and contemporary pressures, and does it well.
Part Two:
Considering that I actually liked the first part of this course, I have to admit that I was very much disappointed by this one. I have to admit, though, that this was an instructive kind of disappointing, in that the professor's love of the enlightenment finally wore me down to the point where I had to despise just about everything he was trying to praise. In many respects, this course is poorly designed for someone whose feelings about the so-called Enlightenment range from mixed to deeply negative, and the course ends on the wrong foot for someone who is as devoted to religion as I am. In many ways I think the professor of this class was assuming that he was speaking to a friendly audience that liked the thinking of the French Enlightenment as well as other skeptical thinkers or at least was open to them, and that isn't the case as far as I am concerned at all. The professor also tends to conflate the literati who have always been fond of the fads of Western thinking with the sort of people whose opinions we should care about.
This part of the course consists of six hours of lectures mostly about eighteenth century Enlightenment thought. We begin with a discussion on the so-called moderns of the period between 1680 and 1715 (13), after which the professor introduces the listener to the belief system of deism (14). After that the professor looks at the conflict between deism and Christianity, where my own loyalties are pretty obvious (15), and then moves on to discuss Montesquieu and the problem of relativism (16). A discussion of Voltaire's role in bringing English thought to France (17) and then one on Bishop Joseph Butler's view of divine providence follows (18). The professor discusses Hume's skeptical challenge to humanism while not endorsing Hume (19), and Hume was one of the more sympathetic figures here, before returning to Voltaire's own late-career attack on philosophical optimism in his Candide (20). The professor then looks at the triumph of the French enlightenment philosophes (21), discusses Beccaria and enlightened reform of prisons (22), and then closes the lecture proper with Rousseau's dissent to various streams of enlightenment thought, not that they are any better (23), before closing with a look at the materialism and naturalism that were at the outer boundary of Enlightenment thought (24).
Ultimately, your view of this part of the course will be greatly dependent on how willing you are to crawl inside the mind of a deist or atheist Enlightenment thinker. My tolerance for such things is very limited, and certainly not for six hours worth of imagination trying to pretend that I am a skeptical intellectual who believes in the natural goodness of humanity or in the possibility of intellectuals to create heaven on earth with no recognition of the problems of original sin or the blindness that we all have. This course could have been much better, but it would have required someone who was more interested in faith than infidelity, and in the illusory moral progress of humanity during this period and not someone who was intoxicated with the bloviation of intellectuals whose failed ideas have set the West up for centuries of violence in search of utopian solutions like Marxism. Someone who finds a lot to critique about the mainstream thinking of the West is going to have a lot to critique about this course, and is going to be rather bothered by the professor's refusal to address evangelical and traditionalist thinking.
I must admit that I am fond of intellectual history, in part because I have pretty strong intellectual interests in general as well as with regards to history and in part because the field is so obscure. When we look at the world of ideas, if we do, we will notice that ideas and worldviews have a history. This comes as a surprise to many people because when we are living in a particular place and time, the commonplace truths of the contemporary age appear to be so obviously true that we do not stop to examine their history and context. When we do, as the professor of this course does, we get something that is remarkable and enjoyable and somewhat rare, in that the author takes ideas seriously and wishes to present the various thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as people seriously interested in the issues of their time and influenced by their own personal context and what they knew of the past. Some of these thinkers are easier to like in the present-day, and some of them have been nearly forgotten, but this professor gives them all their due, and that is certainly admirable, whatever his own views happen to be.
The twelve lectures over six hours in this part of the course are divided so that they cover a wide variety of thinkers, mostly in the 1600's. The professor begins with a discussion of intellectual history as a discipline and the process and nature of conceptual change over time (1). After this the author looks at the worldview that was dominant in the western intellectual world at the beginning of the 17th century, namely Aristotelian scholasticism (2). After this introductory material to set the context, the author discusses the new vision of Francis Bacon (3), the new astronomy and cosmology that legitimized a new view of science and philosophy (4), and Descartes' dream of perfect knowledge (5). After that comes a look at the specter of Thomas Hobbes (6), the combination of skepticism and Jansenism that led to the fideism of Blaise Pascal (7), a couple of lectures of Newton's discovery (8) and the revolution in thought that came about because of his writings (9). After that the first part concludes with lectures on John Locke's thinking (10) and his massive influence on his times (11) as well as the skepticism and Calvinism and fideism of the largely forgotten Pierre Bayle (12).
There are a few threads that connect the various thinkers discussed in these lectures. For one, all of them were strongly influenced by the political, religious, and intellectual issues of their days. This included the rise of absolutist monarchs in France, the fallout from the Protestant Reformation, the political turmoil in places like England and Germany, the struggle for religious liberty for minorities, the repercussions of the Copernican theory, and the degree in which human beings could be confident in their rational capacities. The complexities and cross-currents of the time meant that people were often involved in many aspects of the issues of their time--Newton wrote extensively on faith as well as mathematics, Locke was involved in practical politics as well as educational and political theory, and Bayle's skeptical writing was done in part in an attempt to convince the French monarchy that Protestants were not disloyal citizens, so that he and his co-religionists could return home from exile. The author does a good job presenting a nuanced understanding of a variety of important thinkers based on their own context and contemporary pressures, and does it well.
Part Two:
Considering that I actually liked the first part of this course, I have to admit that I was very much disappointed by this one. I have to admit, though, that this was an instructive kind of disappointing, in that the professor's love of the enlightenment finally wore me down to the point where I had to despise just about everything he was trying to praise. In many respects, this course is poorly designed for someone whose feelings about the so-called Enlightenment range from mixed to deeply negative, and the course ends on the wrong foot for someone who is as devoted to religion as I am. In many ways I think the professor of this class was assuming that he was speaking to a friendly audience that liked the thinking of the French Enlightenment as well as other skeptical thinkers or at least was open to them, and that isn't the case as far as I am concerned at all. The professor also tends to conflate the literati who have always been fond of the fads of Western thinking with the sort of people whose opinions we should care about.
This part of the course consists of six hours of lectures mostly about eighteenth century Enlightenment thought. We begin with a discussion on the so-called moderns of the period between 1680 and 1715 (13), after which the professor introduces the listener to the belief system of deism (14). After that the professor looks at the conflict between deism and Christianity, where my own loyalties are pretty obvious (15), and then moves on to discuss Montesquieu and the problem of relativism (16). A discussion of Voltaire's role in bringing English thought to France (17) and then one on Bishop Joseph Butler's view of divine providence follows (18). The professor discusses Hume's skeptical challenge to humanism while not endorsing Hume (19), and Hume was one of the more sympathetic figures here, before returning to Voltaire's own late-career attack on philosophical optimism in his Candide (20). The professor then looks at the triumph of the French enlightenment philosophes (21), discusses Beccaria and enlightened reform of prisons (22), and then closes the lecture proper with Rousseau's dissent to various streams of enlightenment thought, not that they are any better (23), before closing with a look at the materialism and naturalism that were at the outer boundary of Enlightenment thought (24).
Ultimately, your view of this part of the course will be greatly dependent on how willing you are to crawl inside the mind of a deist or atheist Enlightenment thinker. My tolerance for such things is very limited, and certainly not for six hours worth of imagination trying to pretend that I am a skeptical intellectual who believes in the natural goodness of humanity or in the possibility of intellectuals to create heaven on earth with no recognition of the problems of original sin or the blindness that we all have. This course could have been much better, but it would have required someone who was more interested in faith than infidelity, and in the illusory moral progress of humanity during this period and not someone who was intoxicated with the bloviation of intellectuals whose failed ideas have set the West up for centuries of violence in search of utopian solutions like Marxism. Someone who finds a lot to critique about the mainstream thinking of the West is going to have a lot to critique about this course, and is going to be rather bothered by the professor's refusal to address evangelical and traditionalist thinking.
July 22, 2014
This is probably the best introduction to the Enlightenment Age I've yet to come across. He starts the story at the end of the Reformation and the real beginnings of scientific inquiry which lays the ground work for the Enlightenment. It takes the wearing down of proof by authority with the Aristotelian concept of knowledge through experience to lead to the clear thinking about nature and human's real place in the universe. He covers the topics mostly by considering the development of thought as a long series of conversations overtime with many great thinkers. Alan Kors presents each topic clearly and he will wow you with his summaries of the great thinkers (in half hour segments). I'm still awestruck by Pierre Bayle's arguments for per-determinism.
I highly recommend this course. The only caveat is some people might find Kors' accent bothersome. I never do focus on accents. I'm grateful I never had a teacher who was a entertaining as Kors is on the 17th and 18th history of thought, because if I had I would have majored in history and would be looking for a job.
I highly recommend this course. The only caveat is some people might find Kors' accent bothersome. I never do focus on accents. I'm grateful I never had a teacher who was a entertaining as Kors is on the 17th and 18th history of thought, because if I had I would have majored in history and would be looking for a job.
January 9, 2020
Great introductory lectures to the topic; well organized, insightful, and the intellectual history frame works especially well here given the seismic epistemological shifts underway in the 17th and 18th centuries.
July 17, 2020
Something which has confused me: why were so many past thinkers who seem very modern in a lot of ways very un-modern in their religious convictions? These lectures hint at an answer: atheism isn't as simple an idea as it appears, and actually has a lot of moving parts. It didn't develop into an MVP until about the 19th Century.
Inventing atheism requires lots of little innovations. The idea of rules of nature. Realising that with Rules of Nature, God doesn't need to be actively participating in the world. And that the traditional teachings aren't necessarily correct. And so maybe the miracles of the bible didn't actually happen. That there are other cultures, norms, and religions, so that one's religious affiliation depends on the accident of birth. That morality can be based on the pursuit of happiness rather than subservience to God. That utilitarianism can be a basis for the legitimacy of government.
Kors thinks Piere Bayle is probably the single person who's had the biggest post mortem decline from celebrity to obscurity. Apparently he was *the* most popular author in private libraries in 18th century France. And I had never heard of him before now.
His story is illuminating. He was fed up with people presuming to be able to rationally interpret the will of God. So he showed that you can refute even the most basic facts of religion using reason, thus proving that faith trumps reason. But then, in the 18th Century his arguments were used un-ironically, and pious old Bayle was became the figurehead of atheism.
Bayle compares God giving humans the freedom to sin to a mother taking her daughter to a ball where she knows the daughter will be "debauched at a dance, and lose her divinity and her soul", which I found hilarious.
"Presumptive authority of the past" is a good phrase to mean "our inherited intellectual work (especially Aristotle) is true until proven otherwise".
Mathew Tindal primarily known via his refutations.
A stirring summary of the new philosophers' perspective:
> The ancients are not from this perspective the wise, elderly minds of humanity. They came first; they are the children of humanity. _We_ are the elders of civilization. We are those who have learned cumulatively and added to the storehouse of human understanding.
Inventing atheism requires lots of little innovations. The idea of rules of nature. Realising that with Rules of Nature, God doesn't need to be actively participating in the world. And that the traditional teachings aren't necessarily correct. And so maybe the miracles of the bible didn't actually happen. That there are other cultures, norms, and religions, so that one's religious affiliation depends on the accident of birth. That morality can be based on the pursuit of happiness rather than subservience to God. That utilitarianism can be a basis for the legitimacy of government.
Kors thinks Piere Bayle is probably the single person who's had the biggest post mortem decline from celebrity to obscurity. Apparently he was *the* most popular author in private libraries in 18th century France. And I had never heard of him before now.
His story is illuminating. He was fed up with people presuming to be able to rationally interpret the will of God. So he showed that you can refute even the most basic facts of religion using reason, thus proving that faith trumps reason. But then, in the 18th Century his arguments were used un-ironically, and pious old Bayle was became the figurehead of atheism.
Bayle compares God giving humans the freedom to sin to a mother taking her daughter to a ball where she knows the daughter will be "debauched at a dance, and lose her divinity and her soul", which I found hilarious.
"Presumptive authority of the past" is a good phrase to mean "our inherited intellectual work (especially Aristotle) is true until proven otherwise".
Mathew Tindal primarily known via his refutations.
A stirring summary of the new philosophers' perspective:
> The ancients are not from this perspective the wise, elderly minds of humanity. They came first; they are the children of humanity. _We_ are the elders of civilization. We are those who have learned cumulatively and added to the storehouse of human understanding.
November 16, 2016
An extraordinary learning experience....
For those considering purchasing this lecture series from The Great Courses (of course when it's on sale and you have a coupon), please, please do it...you'll be the wiser for it.
Despite, or maybe because of, Dr Kors deliberate delivery style these lectures provide a clear pictures of the extraordinary evolution of human thought that happened in the 16th to 18th centuries that resonate with us today, especially we in the US.
Kors adroitly traces the history thinking process from Aristotelian scholasticism and rationalism to empiricism and naturalism (and the scientific method). These are all big words that, before listening (and re-listening...again and again) I had little sense or context. 'Calvin and Hobbes' was just about a young boy's imagination. Newton was responsible for my 'C' in Calculus 101. Voltaire was into satire...you get the idea.
Dr Kors methodically takes us through this philosophical evolution, largely stimulated by huge leaps in the understanding of how the universe works. Scientific discoveries by Descartes, Pascal and, of course, Newton changed the way humans looked at the deeply entrenched dogmas so prevalent at the time, by advancing man's knowledge of the universe. Works by Bacon, Bayle and Butler were countered or augmented by Montesquieu, Locke, Hobbes and Voltaire (you'll have to look elsewhere for Spinoza). Naturalism became more widely accepted...Deism allowed humans to consider careful observation of nature over supernatural causes. The Enlightenment's legacy involves our desire to learn from experience and to apply that learning to all aspects of living. In the concluding lectures,
Finally, Kors reflects on Diderot's writings which state (in part): "Time and purely natural agencies transform the living into inorganic and the inorganic into the living. Life and death are two modes of the same matter. The hypothesis of God explains nothing, confuses much, and is unnecessary."
My summary is oh-so inadequate. These lectures are powerful and should pondered often as they summarize so clearly the foundations of our society today.
Highly recommended.
For those considering purchasing this lecture series from The Great Courses (of course when it's on sale and you have a coupon), please, please do it...you'll be the wiser for it.
Despite, or maybe because of, Dr Kors deliberate delivery style these lectures provide a clear pictures of the extraordinary evolution of human thought that happened in the 16th to 18th centuries that resonate with us today, especially we in the US.
Kors adroitly traces the history thinking process from Aristotelian scholasticism and rationalism to empiricism and naturalism (and the scientific method). These are all big words that, before listening (and re-listening...again and again) I had little sense or context. 'Calvin and Hobbes' was just about a young boy's imagination. Newton was responsible for my 'C' in Calculus 101. Voltaire was into satire...you get the idea.
Dr Kors methodically takes us through this philosophical evolution, largely stimulated by huge leaps in the understanding of how the universe works. Scientific discoveries by Descartes, Pascal and, of course, Newton changed the way humans looked at the deeply entrenched dogmas so prevalent at the time, by advancing man's knowledge of the universe. Works by Bacon, Bayle and Butler were countered or augmented by Montesquieu, Locke, Hobbes and Voltaire (you'll have to look elsewhere for Spinoza). Naturalism became more widely accepted...Deism allowed humans to consider careful observation of nature over supernatural causes. The Enlightenment's legacy involves our desire to learn from experience and to apply that learning to all aspects of living. In the concluding lectures,
Finally, Kors reflects on Diderot's writings which state (in part): "Time and purely natural agencies transform the living into inorganic and the inorganic into the living. Life and death are two modes of the same matter. The hypothesis of God explains nothing, confuses much, and is unnecessary."
My summary is oh-so inadequate. These lectures are powerful and should pondered often as they summarize so clearly the foundations of our society today.
Highly recommended.
November 21, 2022
It may well be that the Enlightenment was the second most impactful transformation (good and bad) for humans and the planet after the Agricultural Revolution. While ancient Greece gave birth to many ideas Enlightenment ran with, such ideas lay dormant for 2000 years after Athens. It’s this amazing transformation and the great expansion of thought that Benjamin Franklin’s University of Pennsylvania historian Alan Charles Kors chronicles in a wonder and awe tour of the Enlightenment. The capacity of that three-pound noodle between our ears to grapple with its most remarkable abstractions lies at the foundation of this series, from concepts of God to the natural world as it is at the edge of the universe to unseen atoms in our hands. It’s this conversion that took place from supernaturalism to naturalism that forms a central theme in this lecture series. There are the usual suspects in this conversion, from Bacon, Descartes, Pascal, and Newton, to Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu, but also remarkable, less-known figures, including Butler, La Mettrie, and Bayle. The big picture with essential nuance is well placed and well delivered, and I never knew that Voltaire and Rousseau had such a row; that for once, Rousseau could be so patently wrong and Voltaire so right, ending up in Voltaire’s greatest written work as an answer to Rousseau: his Candide. What a terrific addition to daily dog walks and dark nights, fireside with the pups at a campsite.
As another learning channel through the ears, not the eyes, this series and so many others from The Great Courses are a national treasure. (No, I have no stock or relations in TGC.) As a companion to this audio comes a 92-page summary for the series. It includes an overview of each lecture (about two pages each), course goals, a paragraph sketch of each philosopher, and an additional reading list (about 50 books). Keep in mind that every course on TGC is on sale once per year. You can pay $30 for an audio download on sale or $90 regular price. If you prefer DVDs, they’re available.
As another learning channel through the ears, not the eyes, this series and so many others from The Great Courses are a national treasure. (No, I have no stock or relations in TGC.) As a companion to this audio comes a 92-page summary for the series. It includes an overview of each lecture (about two pages each), course goals, a paragraph sketch of each philosopher, and an additional reading list (about 50 books). Keep in mind that every course on TGC is on sale once per year. You can pay $30 for an audio download on sale or $90 regular price. If you prefer DVDs, they’re available.
January 21, 2017
Only a cursory overview of The Enlightenment is given in High School. I doubt that many people are very familiar with this critical period in human history in which epistemological thought was irrevocably altered from having a basis in religious dogma to having grounds established in inductive empiricism.
I've attempted to research the work of major Enlightenment philosophers in the past but I've never come across a course as well thought out or as wonderfully explained by Alan Charles Kors. Major Enlightenment thinkers including Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and David Hume and their various works are explored and discussed throughout twenty-four consecutive lectures. The development and beginnings of what was called 'natural philosophy' (or as we know it today....science) are portrayed in exquisite detail. Kors does a magnificent job of putting across the main ideas espoused by each thinker and how those ideas influenced both science and sociology as well as how they gave us our modern world.
If I had any complaint about this course, it would be that I believe it focused a little too much on the development of science and not enough on the thoughts regarding human nature and how it should shape ideal governments. I'm really nitpicking because, in fact, the course does indeed explore that to some extent but doesn't really go into the particular details that some of these philosophers are known for. John Locke, for instance, was known for his system of epistemology that encompassed both experience and rationalism, but he was also known for establishing the groundwork for Classical Liberalism, something that the course didn't really touch on.
Very much recommend this Great Course to anyone wanting to acquire a fundamental understanding of the systems of thought that lead both into the creation of the modern world and into the initial developments of what would eventually become Western Democracies.
I've attempted to research the work of major Enlightenment philosophers in the past but I've never come across a course as well thought out or as wonderfully explained by Alan Charles Kors. Major Enlightenment thinkers including Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and David Hume and their various works are explored and discussed throughout twenty-four consecutive lectures. The development and beginnings of what was called 'natural philosophy' (or as we know it today....science) are portrayed in exquisite detail. Kors does a magnificent job of putting across the main ideas espoused by each thinker and how those ideas influenced both science and sociology as well as how they gave us our modern world.
If I had any complaint about this course, it would be that I believe it focused a little too much on the development of science and not enough on the thoughts regarding human nature and how it should shape ideal governments. I'm really nitpicking because, in fact, the course does indeed explore that to some extent but doesn't really go into the particular details that some of these philosophers are known for. John Locke, for instance, was known for his system of epistemology that encompassed both experience and rationalism, but he was also known for establishing the groundwork for Classical Liberalism, something that the course didn't really touch on.
Very much recommend this Great Course to anyone wanting to acquire a fundamental understanding of the systems of thought that lead both into the creation of the modern world and into the initial developments of what would eventually become Western Democracies.
August 3, 2022
What is the book about?
The Birth of the Modern Mind outlines major philosophical positions of the past, spending half an hour on each and narrated most comprehensibly and passionately by Alan Charles Kors. He takes care of the historical context by describing the spirit of the philosophers’ times.
Can I recommend it? Whom is this book for?
Yes, definitely. Its a concise overview and a pleasure to listen. Kors tells the stories with a passion that is infectuous. Yet, if you want to focus on the philosopher’s positions and their concepts, you may want to listen to The Modern Intellectual Tradition by Lawrence Cahoone, because Cahoone focuses more narrowly on the philosophers themselves rather than on their historical context. So, both books complement each other.
What did I learn from this book, if no specific concept?
I learned that, since past philosophers were majorly concerned with epistemology or criticising the society of their time and since epistemology and critical theory are not particular interests of mine, I do not need to concern myself with all or even some, but only a small minority of thinkers from the past.
Also, many philosophers used god as an explanation for significant parts of their theories. Since god pretty much explains nothing, substantial gaps remain open in their accounts which often makes it difficult to draw important and useful insights from them.
As far as knowledge goes, I am only concerned with the history of knowledge and education.
Other than that, the only interests of mine which history of philosophy seem to serve are those for ethics of a good life by the ancient greeks, aesthetics, existentialism, phenomenology and analytic philosophy — the latter three being quite recent movements.
The Birth of the Modern Mind outlines major philosophical positions of the past, spending half an hour on each and narrated most comprehensibly and passionately by Alan Charles Kors. He takes care of the historical context by describing the spirit of the philosophers’ times.
Can I recommend it? Whom is this book for?
Yes, definitely. Its a concise overview and a pleasure to listen. Kors tells the stories with a passion that is infectuous. Yet, if you want to focus on the philosopher’s positions and their concepts, you may want to listen to The Modern Intellectual Tradition by Lawrence Cahoone, because Cahoone focuses more narrowly on the philosophers themselves rather than on their historical context. So, both books complement each other.
What did I learn from this book, if no specific concept?
I learned that, since past philosophers were majorly concerned with epistemology or criticising the society of their time and since epistemology and critical theory are not particular interests of mine, I do not need to concern myself with all or even some, but only a small minority of thinkers from the past.
Also, many philosophers used god as an explanation for significant parts of their theories. Since god pretty much explains nothing, substantial gaps remain open in their accounts which often makes it difficult to draw important and useful insights from them.
As far as knowledge goes, I am only concerned with the history of knowledge and education.
Other than that, the only interests of mine which history of philosophy seem to serve are those for ethics of a good life by the ancient greeks, aesthetics, existentialism, phenomenology and analytic philosophy — the latter three being quite recent movements.
July 12, 2021
The Birth of the Modern Mind: The Intellectual History of the 17th and 18th Centuries by Alan Charles Kors is a remarkably good survey course, albeit one that is entirely European in orientation. Part of that has to do with the fact that this course doesn't neatly fill up the entirety of its two hundred years. It starts late and finishes early, so to speak. No time is spent at all on the colonies, though a few references are tossed out as seeds for what would germinate into the rebellion. No time is spent on the French revolution, either. Two shattering events of the late 18th century fell silent, and none of their banner bearers get much of a reference. The timeline ends with Rousseau, and mostly as a dissenter to the forms of critique and thought permeating in the period examined. While there are reasons for this, and indeed one may even feel that the treatment of those figures covered in this survey was too brief and cursory, it does leave something to be desired. Kors also implies that serious religious philosophy is dead by the time he's done with things, but that's neither here nor there. Overall though, this is very well done, and is a very useful introduction for newcomers.
88/100
88/100
September 8, 2017
It's hard to add much more to Sebastian, Patrick and Jim's reviews. Like them I gave this set of Great Courses lectures by Prof. Kors 5 stars. Having just finished Part 1 of Peter Gays history of the Enlightenment, I bit into this series with hopeful enthusiasm and was not disappointed. Kors' passion for his material comes through in all his lectures, though his riff on Newton impact was mind blowing. As another reviewer stated, who knew about Beccaria and his epic challenge to existing legal norms and traditions of protection and penalties. (Though it turns out that Beccaria wasn't even the intellectual author of those ideas, two Italian brothers were, and Beccaria just happened to be a most accomplished writer and interpreter of there theories.) So goes the wheel of history. As is mostly the case with my experience with Great Courses materials, the content and presentation is top notch, engaging and thought provoking and stimulates an intense interest and desire to dig deeper into the original materials as well as new discoveries.
September 11, 2020
One of the best lecture series I've ever heard. These lectures show how the idea of what constitutes "evidence" "proof" and "knowledge" changed dramatically in the 17th century. The thoughts that Francis Bacon puts forward in the early 1600s are radical and almost viewed as heretical; by the end of the century, those same approaches are being celebrated as Newton is celebrated world-wide for provable general knowledge. Most of the 'modern' ideas will sound familiar, even obvious, because they are how we think about knowledge today. This course does a marvelous job of showing how differently the world of thought and intellectualism was before the 17th century, why and how it changed (including the quirky personalities of the people who made the revolution in thought), and some degree of why we can have confidence that this revolution in thought is lasting and not subject to a comparable revolution.
I liked this so much that I've become a devoted user of the "Great Courses" lecture series.
I liked this so much that I've become a devoted user of the "Great Courses" lecture series.
March 6, 2018
This lecture series covers the history of philosophical inquiry during the enlightenment.
The subject matter is actually pretty peculiar - for the most part it does not cover either the scientific achievements nor the political theory of the time (both of which I was more familiar with). Instead, it's a survey of the methods of thinking, reasoning, and of theological disputation during the time period. Which is pretty interesting and less well-trod ground.
Kors is a talented lecturer and has a way of making the subject matter clear and fresh. If I had to criticize, he can repeat himself a bit and can get into a sort of rhetorical rhythm that lulls you into complacency. Overall, however, I don't think you can expect a better survey of the enlightenment.
The subject matter is actually pretty peculiar - for the most part it does not cover either the scientific achievements nor the political theory of the time (both of which I was more familiar with). Instead, it's a survey of the methods of thinking, reasoning, and of theological disputation during the time period. Which is pretty interesting and less well-trod ground.
Kors is a talented lecturer and has a way of making the subject matter clear and fresh. If I had to criticize, he can repeat himself a bit and can get into a sort of rhetorical rhythm that lulls you into complacency. Overall, however, I don't think you can expect a better survey of the enlightenment.
December 24, 2016
Well organized and lucid. He leaves out a few people (Spinoza and Swift, for instance), and is such...a...slow...talker that upping the playback speed to 1.5 just made him sound like a typical New Yorker---but he delivers positions and arguments associated with each of his chosen thinkers with both clarity and passion (and, occasionally, touches of humor).
October 24, 2019
Oct 2019. An attempt to remedy my ignorance of the Cartesian tradition.
After six lectures: Our lecturer is a historian, not a philosopher. He attempts to present objectively a series of developing intellectual positions, starting with Aristotelian scholasticism ("What would a first-year undergraduate study at a university in the year 1600?"). So far it is "shallow," not in a pejorative sense, but each thinker/topic gets a single lecture. I have objected to several of his paraphrases of Plato and Aristotle, but that's not the point of this series. These lectures won't "remedy my ignorance," which will take hard work with several books on logic and philosophy, written by authors with more "buy in" in the rough-and-tumble of ideas, but it's a start.
Finished. This is a great survey: engaging, coherent, synthetic, hard-hitting. As it proceeds, the connections across lectures become more apparent, eliminating some of the the superficial quality described above. I want a sequel (18C-19C) from the same lecturer.
After six lectures: Our lecturer is a historian, not a philosopher. He attempts to present objectively a series of developing intellectual positions, starting with Aristotelian scholasticism ("What would a first-year undergraduate study at a university in the year 1600?"). So far it is "shallow," not in a pejorative sense, but each thinker/topic gets a single lecture. I have objected to several of his paraphrases of Plato and Aristotle, but that's not the point of this series. These lectures won't "remedy my ignorance," which will take hard work with several books on logic and philosophy, written by authors with more "buy in" in the rough-and-tumble of ideas, but it's a start.
Finished. This is a great survey: engaging, coherent, synthetic, hard-hitting. As it proceeds, the connections across lectures become more apparent, eliminating some of the the superficial quality described above. I want a sequel (18C-19C) from the same lecturer.
July 9, 2023
Hey look more illuminaries society holds up as proof of accomplishment while ignoring everything they say.
3,000 years of civilization and we've yet to catch up with the ethic of an untaught child or a fed dog.
3,000 years of civilization and we've yet to catch up with the ethic of an untaught child or a fed dog.
June 9, 2017
A fantastic introduction of the ideas of the Enlightenment.
suspended
June 5, 2019Finished Part I. Suspended 6/5/19 since overdue and can't renew.
September 19, 2021
Seriously excellent whistle stop tour of the major stepping stones from scholasticism to the Enlightenment. Totes recommend.
December 13, 2021
solid survey. vivid and compelling. unfortunately a bit oversimplified and biased (despite repeated claims to the contrary, particularly with respect to newton).
March 21, 2022
Love this lecturer. Could listen to him for hours.
June 12, 2023
The first eight chapter are very good, things slowly move southward from there because of his insistence of not reading see the individuals in their socio-political oeuvre. Instead, individuals are like siloes unimpeded and untouched by economics, culture or politics. Dream on.
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