Enlightenment
What was so enlightened about the enlightenment? Where is the evidence of how it enlightened anybody?The enlightenment was a period where previous notions of our world were disregarded and new views adopted in their place. Authority no longer came from divine scripture, ancient philosophers, or the wisdom of cultural tradition but instead Europe adopted the modern scientific outlook using detailed systematic examinations of our environment to reveal its causes and effects. The origins of the enlightenment can be found in classic Greek culture, notably the Socratic school including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Aristotle and his colleagues at the time used a dialectic empirical process for understanding a wide range of different subjects ranging from biology to mathematics, politics, geology and astronomy. One of his major contributions to the Enlightenment was his idea of causality where each thing or event has more than one reason to explain what, why, and where it is. Often these theories incorporated religious beliefs of the time, the origins of the universe and man finding their explanation as a divine process. Man was viewed as the center of meaning on Earth and Earth as the center of meaning in the universe. Although,
Germany and fascism resulting in the Holocaust, Stalin and communism, Mao Zedong and the people's revolution, America and its fight for democracy specifically southern Asia, the extermination of indigenous peoples the world over, the French Revolution, Mussolini's regime, Franco's regime, Suharto's regime, America's regimes, and the decline of moral standards in the absence of the old faith. 'The Enlightenment' in its wording seems to suggest a religious event and in many ways the Enlightenment was a religious event and consequently science was treated as a religion- The Church of Logic. Scholasticism rediscovered those texts and reexamined them allowing Europeans to use more complex explanations for the different phenomenon of the world; planets, politics, etc. Much of Greek and Roman thought was lost for centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. So, although astronomical discoveries don't provide Earth-bound application, they provide multiple relationships for the term and idea 'Enlightenment' by telling us about light(star/sun) is positioned in the universe and also by shedding new light on previous notions which were thought to already be enlightened. many reasonable ideas in chemistry, geology, and other science developed during the Hellenistic and surrounding Greek ages, the period was relatively short and much of what was discovered became dogma for later ages. It is not apparent that a discovery of the mechanisms for our galaxy would be one of the most important events of the Enlightenment, seeing as it is mostly useless information. Misinterpreting the complexities of the subjects they examine, science often serves to support many immoral actions and ideas. By revealing one of the most important premises of Christian thought- that the Earth is the center of the universe- to be false, the omniscience of religious texts and authority became questioned and with that began the greater questioning of the world around us we call The Enlightenment or Science. The discoveries in astronomy opposed the previous religious authority on what meaning is. Just because the omniscience of the church was disbanded by the Enlightenment, it didn't mean that anyone else gained omniscience and many of the theories succeeding the Enlightenment had dubious merits. Scholasticism was the predominant school of thought during the middle ages both hindering and supporting the Enlightenment. Others include the brutalities of colonialism, the exploitation of the common man, the exploitation and destruction of the Earth and its recourses, justifications for enormous divisions of wealth (capitalism), justifications for enormous divisions of wealth using the argument that you are fairly dividing the wealth finally (communism/marxism), the development of modern weapons and the genocides they incur.
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Acceptance Essays
