Voltaire

November 21, 1694 – May 30, 1778

Full name: François-Marie Arouet

From a first Glance, Voltaire appears to any old 18^th century philisophe, but if you dive deeper you find one of the most influential and famous enlightenment thinkers of all time. His views on religion, politics, and science would help to push society to how it operates today. The controversies he sparked and his mission to raise awareness of things such ad Newtonianism solidified both his fame and his infamy.

Voltaire both is and isn’t credited with the introduction of science and enlightenment ideas into the modern era. Although he was responsible for them becoming more public, he was not origin point of the ideas, rather he was a very large supporter of these ideas. A “popularizer” is what most people of his time would call Voltaire, using his literary skills he was able to spread to concepts of Newtonianism and rationalism in clear, concise and attractive ways. During his time as an Exile in France he grew alarge fascination with the immerging ideas of Newton, and would eventually become a complete supporter of Newtonianism. Voltaire even attended Newton’s funeral, where his famous though arose; “that great intellectual achievement might alter history.”² Newton had found fame and recognition through his discoveries, Voltaire would to the same through his writings. His works “were remarkable neither for depth of analysis, accuracy or originality but rather for cleverness of expression and ability to say quotable things at the right moment.”¹ This is where the controversy steps in however, many of his time considered him a fraud, or fake philisophe. He wasn’t a true scientist, and even after his role in the popularization of scientific ideas he was unable to keep up with them, in this is was seen as an amateur of science. He “achieved fame because his curiosity pushed him into an amazing variety of fields, because he was able to glean the essentials from the work of more thoroughgoing scholars, and because he had literary ability.”¹ , not because how was truly masterful or knowledgeable in science as the ideas the popularized.

Before becoming a criticized scientific supporter, Voltaire was primarily known for his playwriting. And as he had wished, his writings brought him immense fame and is what allowed his popularization of scientific and enlightenment ideas to come to fruition. Through his plays, poems, and novels he commented (and sometimes even slightly parodied) things like Newtonianism, rationalism, government, religion and history. His every growing interest in science would pave the way for future religious beliefs, eventually turning him extremely anti-religious. Many of Voltaire’s views on religion plant direct attacks of Judaism in fact it could be argues that his attacks of Judaism were unlined attacks on Christianity. Voltaire believed that “the Jews remained the same innately corrupt people they had always been and that they were still capable of doing additional harm, in the future, to the Europeans among whom they lived.”³ And would “single out the Jews not simply in order to pursue an indirect or veiled attack on the Christian religion but, in large part, because he considered them to be responsible for the very existence of that religion”³ His criticisms of religion would obviously bring him misfortune, as it was the 18^th century, but not before his enlightenment ideas were spread far an wide.

His popularization of ideas like government corruption helped others to question authority and how the higher ups should run their lives. His enthusiasm for science and remarks of religion helped to usher in the scientific age and the start to the end to religious control. Although not a true Scientific mind, Voltaire was both a fantastic writer and a true philosopher, and it is likely because of his writings that the world operates the way it does today.

Nic Verspaget

Works Cited

¹Rockwood O, Raymond. “Voltaire.” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Dec., 1937), pp. 493- 501. The University of Chicago Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1899207

²Johnson, W. “Voltaire after 300 Years.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Jul., 1994), pp. 215-220. Royal Society Stable. http://www.jstor.org/stable/532163

³Arkush, Allan. “Voltaire on Judaism and Christianity.” AJS Review, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1993), pp. 223-243. Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Jewish Studies. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1486572

Rosenthal, Jerome. “Voltaire’s Philosophy of History.” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Apr., 1955), pp. 151-178. University of Pennsylvania Press Stable. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2707660

Topazio W, Virgil. “Voltaire, Philosopher of Human Progress.” PMLA, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Sep., 1959), pp. 356- 364. Modern Language Association. http://www.jstor.org/stable/460445

Zerffi G, G. “Voltaire, in His Relation to the Study of General History, from a Philosophical Point of View.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 10 (1882), pp. 344-370. Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Historical Society. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3678028

Montesquieu

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu was born on January 18^th, 1689. Montesquieu was a French political philosopher during the Age of Enlightenment. He was an aristocrat from the south of France, in the region of Bordeaux. While Montesquieu held a high position in the traditional French society, he is most known for criticizing the system of government through his famous works, “The Persian Letters” and “De L’Esprit de Lois (Spirit of the Laws).” Montesquieu is a historically significant figure as his ideas had direct influence upon later thought and the development of government institutions.

In Persian letters, Montesquieu constructs a story that criticizes the church and state, using satire to remark the lack of liberty and religious tolerance in the characters. Arguably, his most famous and effective work was the Spirt of the Laws where he classifies the different systems of government: monarchism, republicanism, and despotism. It is through this work that Montesquieu composes new ideas on the systematic relations of government. His work supported the idea that different governments were able to thrive in different environments and outlined the importance of the separation of powers within government. His ideas on the separation of powers would form the three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial. This work was inspired by the corruptness of the aristocracy which Montesquieu believed was because of Louis XIV’s absolute government. Spirit of the Laws is viewed as a significant document of political science in the Age of Enlightenment.  While Montesquieu preceded the generation of intellectuals who were intrigued by man’s natural place in the universe, he himself accepted the idea that man is both intelligent and a creation of God. He reflected the philosophes who were defined by discovery and curiosity of the laws that God set in motion. It is these beliefs that enabled Montesquieu to divulge and immerse himself in the discovery of the laws by which man were to govern themselves.

Montesquieu lived during the revolutionary time marked by a series of processes that Europe underwent in the global transition to modernity. Intellectuals of this time, namely philosophes, were acquiring different information and developing new ideas that would transform society; for example, individualism, toleration, progress, and natural rights. This time is referred to as the Enlightenment. Montesquieu was an Enlightenment figure and represented many of its newly presented ideals through his works. This being the belief and understanding of natural laws, rather than supernatural, in terms of governing the universe. Montesquieu had travelled to places across the world in his research of government and politics, including England. Much of his works were inspired by the thoughts of intellectuals like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Specifically, John Locke, who stressed the notion that it was the government jobs to protect the divine rights of the people, and firmly believed in “life, liberty, and property”. These ideas are apparent within Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws, where the principles of all different governments were set into place.

Montesquieu’s critiques against the system of government was influenced by the time, where he along many other philosophes questioned what was considered ‘accepted belief’. Montesquieu outlined three different forms of government: monarchism, republicanism, and despotism in terms of the new Enlightenment idea of the social contract. He strongly believed that government should not be based upon the divine right of rule, but through the social contract. It is in the social contract that an implicit agreement is made between the government and the people, where the people give up some of their freedoms to receive a life of protection under the government. He used his work to explain how governments might be protected from corruption. He saw governments ruled by despotism dangerous for any government that ruled otherwise, and argued it was important to take preventative measures by a system in which different bodies exercised legislative, executive, and judicial power, and in which all were bound by the rule of law.

Montesquieu died on February 10^th, 1755 but his political ideas remain relevant to this day. His theory of the separation of powers has had an impact on theories in liberal politics, and on the founders of the constitution of the United States. In terms of drafting the constitution, the founders of the document itself were influenced by Montesquieu and his connection to the separation of powers. One of the American founders named James Madison, drew inspiration from Montesquieu’s idea that to secure the liberty and freedom of the people, and to prevent corruption within the government, there must be a divide amongst the powers of government. Montesquieu stated in the Spirit of Laws: “were the executive power not to have a right of restraining the encroachments of the legislative body, the latter would become despotic; as it might arrogate to itself what authority it pleased, it would soon destroy all the other powers.” With this influential knowledge, the Founding Fathers established the three branches of government within the federal constitution: executive (the President), legislative (the Congress), and the judiciary (the Supreme Court).

Chantelle Boyles

Key Terms:

Absolutism- the political doctrine and practice of unlimited, centralized authority, and absolute sovereignty, as vested in a monarch or dictator. The essence of an absolute system is that the ruling power is not subject to regularized challenge or check by any other power.

Despotism- the exercise of absolute power, in a cruel or oppressive way.

Individualism- a concept that places the focus on the individual (as opposed to the community) and the removal of barriers to achieve the highest amount of freedom for everyone.

Natural Rights- an innate set of rights and freedoms given by God that cannot be taken away or restricted by government.

Philosophe- a term for intellectuals in all fields of inquiry during the Enlighenment.

Works Cited

England and the French Enlightenment. Accessed November 12, 2017. http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~tshannon/hist106web/site6/england_and_the_french_enlighten.htm

Enlightenment Ideals. Accessed November 12, 2017. http://www.pelister.org/MAJ302/AmericanEnlightenment/EnlightenmentIdeals.html.

“BARON DE MONTESQUIEU.” Baron de Montesquieu: A Short Biography. Accessed November 12, 2017. http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/montesquieu/montesquieu-bio.html.

Bok, Hilary. “Baron de Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. July 18, 2003. Accessed November 12, 2017. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/montesquieu/.

“Charles Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu.” Montesquieu, Separation of Powers, the Constitution, and the Founding Fathers. Accessed November 12, 2017. http://www.americassurvivalguide.com/montesquieu.php.

“Charles-Louis de Secondat.” Biography.com. December 08, 2016. Accessed November 12, 2017. https://www.biography.com/people/charles-louis-de-secondat-21292453.

“Online Library of Liberty.” Montesquieu and the Separation of Powers – Online Library of Liberty. Accessed November 12, 2017. http://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/montesquieu-and-the-separation-of-powers.

Further Reading:

 

“SPIRIT.” Montesquieu: The Spirit of Laws. Accessed November 12, 2017. http://www.constitution.org/cm/sol.htm.

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Sept. 30, 1715—Aug. 2/3, 1780

Etienne Bonnot, Abbé de Condillac was a French priest, philosophe, psychologist, logician, and economist that lived during the Enlightenment period. From his birthplace of Grenoble, he moved to Paris to continue his education as a seminarian. In 1740, he was ordained a Roman Catholic priest but did no pastoral work throughout his life. It was also in 1740 that he begun a lifelong friendship with Rousseau. He became acquainted with the writers of the Encyclopedie, lead by Denis Diderot, and befriended numerous philosophes, including La Mettrie and d’Alembert. His position in the French Enlightenment-era salons was solidified with the presence of his first book, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746). He followed this up with Traite des systemes (1749) and his most important work, Traite des sensations (1754). A disciple of English philosopher, John Locke, who had been popularized by Voltaire in France, he was a radical empiricist whose views have come to be known as sensationalism. His published work performed well and earned him a position as a tutor to the Prince of Parma, the grandson of Louis XV (Person para.5) from 1758-68. After this appointment, he returned to Paris but soon left, in 1773, offended by the irreligiousness of the Parisian intellectuals (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica). On logic, he authored works such as La Logique (1780) and La Langue des calculs (1798) (which was incomplete at his death). He left an unmistakeable mark upon the philosophers and scientists of his time.

When Thomas Nugent translated Condillac’s first book into An Essay on the Origin of Human Thought in 1756, he wrote that it was a companion to Locke’s 1690 book, Essay concerning Human Understanding (Albury 118). Condillac is likewise often pegged as merely a disciple of Locke and Newton and also an opponent to Descartes (who also undoubtingly influenced his philosophy). This is not false–in the introduction of his first book, Condillac writes that “Mr. Locke […] has confined himself to the study of the human understanding and has succeeded in the pursuit. Descartes was acquainted neither with the origin nor the formation of our ideas” (Condillac 3). However, the association with philosophers before him has cast a shadow over the ways in which Condillac expanded upon and differed from his predecessors. While Condillac was not the originator of sensationalism, he is a chief proponent of its radical version. He started with Locke’s empiricist thought that the entire content of the mind comes from sense impressions and furthered them, writing that the way that the mind transforms sense impressions also stems from characteristics that are inherent in impressions (Dieckmann 256). While Locke wrote that association of ideas was an uncontrollable process that lead chiefly to errors, Condillac spent the first part of his first essay trying to prove that the use of signs gives us control over the connections between ideas (Albury 118). Without these shared signs, he argues, and then built upon in his second essay, no thinking and no knowledge would be possible (Aarsleff 579). As such, the origin and development of language mirrors the origin of the development of human thought itself. All philosophical studies of language following this launched from Condillac’s theory. His fellow philosophes took to the book and several philosophers borrowed from it in their own works, including d’Alembert, Rousseau, Helvetius, and d’Holbach (Albury 118).

Known for his rigorous application of logic, the methodology with which Condillac approached his arguments is almost as important as the arguments themselves. He spent much time clearly and precisely stating his goal, method, and criteria (Dieckmann 259). An Essay on the Origin of Human Thought was not simply a piece of influential philosophy, but also of psychology and linguistics. The final section of the book is dedicated to considering the analytic method of reasoning used. An entire generation of French scientists, from 1780, embraced this methodology and used it to radically alter fields such as natural history and chemistry (Albury 119). It is the use of this method in psychology that helped to push psychology further from the realm of philosophy and closer to the bracket of science. His book, La Logique, also had a profound influence on science – Lavoisor, for one, acknowledged that he used Condillac’s ideas in his reformation of chemical nomenclature.

Condillac’s influence on science is hardly surprising, as the philosophes sought to apply the scientific method to everything – government, economics, ethics, law, society, and even inner life (Mishra 55). Condillac, himself, sought to expand the application of such methodology to even the nature of the soul. While largely seen as a philosopher of empirical science, he opens An Essay on the Origin of Human Thought with “Of all sciences […] which contributes most to open, as well as to fix and enlarge the understanding […] is metaphysics. said that he hoped to “save Locke’s philosophy from the materialists,” but in trying to prove the existence of the soul scientifically, he strengthens the materialist cause for no science can prove positively the existence of the immaterial (Coski 12). It is likely this departure from the secularity of the philosophes that pulled him away from the liberalism of Paris. Yet while he was there, arguing empiricism with his scientific methodology, he left tremendous influence on those who partook in his work.

Rya Buckley

Works Cited

Aarsleff, Hans. “Reviewed Work: Linguistics, Anthropology and Philsophy in the French Enlightenment by Ulrich Ricken.” Anthropological Linguistics, no. 4 (1995): 578-585. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30028335.

Albury, William R. “Reviewed Work: An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, Being a Supplement to Mr. Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding by Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Thomas Nugent.” Isis, no. 1 (1974): 118-119. http://www.jstor.org/stable/228906.

“Condillac and the Principle of Identity.” Literature Criticism from 1400-1800, edited by James E. Person, Jr, vol. 26 (1995). go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&sw=w&u=ocul_mcmaster&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CH1420012338&it=r&asid=392a8a5f7d77945ff06152d2223e2a6a.

Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de. An essay on the origin of human knowledge. Being a supplement to Mr. Locke’s essay on the human understanding. Translated from the French of the Abbè de Condillac, Member of the Royal Academy of Berlin. By Mr. Nugent. London, 1746. http://find.galegroup.com.libaccess.lib.mcmaster.ca/ecco/retrieve.do?qrySerId=Locale%28en%2C%2C%29%3AFQE%3D%28BN%2CNone%2C7%29N001707%24&sort=Author&docLevel=TEXT_GRAPHICS&inPS=true&prodId=ECCO&userGroupName=ocul_mcmaster&doDirectDocNumSearch=false&tabID=T001&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&searchId=&currentPosition=1&contentSet=ECCOArticles&showLOI=&bookId=0215500200&collectionId=N001707&relevancePageBatch=CW118359702

Coski, Christopher R. “Condillac’s Metaphysical Paradox: The Nature of the Soul, versus the Natural Origin of Language and Reason.” Dalhousie French Studies, Vol 67 (Summer 2004): 3-15. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40837556.

Dieckmann, Herbert. “Condillac’s Philophical Works.” The Review of Metaphysics, no. 2 (1953): 255-261. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20123371

Falkenstein, Lorne and Grandi, Giovanni. “Étienne Bonnot de Condillac” last modified September 21 2017.  https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/condillac/.

Mishra, Pankaj. Age of Anger: A History of the Present. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017.

The Editors of Enclyopaedia Britannica. “Etienne Bonnot de Condillac” last modified September 20, 2007. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Etienne-Bonnot-de-Condillac

Other Relevant Reading:

It is worth reading Condillac’s major works for a first-hand account of his methodology and of his departure from Locke and Descartes. Thus the following compilation book is recommended:

Philosophical Works of Etienne Bonnot, Abbe de Condillac: Volume 1 by F. Phillip and H. Lane