The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on the sovereignty of reason and the evidence of the senses as the primary sources of knowledge and advanced ideals such as liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government and separation of church and state. In France, the central doctrines of the Enlightenment philosophers were individual liberty and religious tolerance, in opposition to an absolute monarchy and the fixed dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. The Enlightenment was marked by an emphasis on the scientific method and reductionism, along with increased questioning of religious orthodoxy—an attitude captured by the phrase Sapere aude (Dare to know).
The Enlightenment Collection brings together the greatest works to emerge from this incredible period of human intellectual creativity.
Featuring:
Meditations on First Philosophy, by Rene Descartes
The Ethics, by Baruch Spinoza
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, by John Locke
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, by David Hume
The Social Contract, by Jean Jacques Rousseau
The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine
Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau
and
On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin
