The Birth Of The Modern Mind: The Intellectual History Of The 17th And 18th Centuries

Course Lecture Titles
IntroductionIntellectual History and Conceptual Change
The Dawn of the 17th CenturyAristotelian Scholasticism
The New Vision of Francis Bacon
The New Astronomy and Cosmology
Descartes's Dream of Perfect Knowledge
The Specter of Thomas Hobbes
Skepticism and JansenismBlaise Pascal
Newton's Discovery
The Newtonian Revolution
John LockeThe Revolution in Knowledge
The Lockean Moment
Skepticism and CalvinismPierre Bayle
The ModernsThe Generation of 1680-1715
Introduction to Deism
The Conflict Between Deism and Christianity
Montesquieu and the Problem of Relativism
VoltaireBringing England To France
Bishop Joseph Butler and God's Providence
The Skeptical Challenge to OptimismDavid Hume
The Assault upon Philosophical OptimismVoltaire
The PhilosophesThe Triumph of the French Enlightenment
Beccaria and Enlightened Reform
Rousseau's Dissent
Materialism & NaturalismThe Boundaries of the Enlightenment

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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.

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