‘After Hume, the next great philosopher was the German, Immanuel Kant. But France also had many important thinkers in the eighteenth century. We could say that the philosophical center of gravity in Europe in the eighteenth century was in England in the first half, in France in the middle, and in Germany toward the end of it.’ ‘A shift from west to east, in other words.’ ‘Precisely. Let me outline some of the ideas that many of the French Enlightenment philosophers had in common. The important names are Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau, but there were many, many others. I shall concentrate
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