Enlightenment Mind and Age

Abstract

All kinds of intellectual and artistic actions on the concept of Enlightenment remarkably refer to the era in which the concept emerged. In this context, it is possible to say that a talk about enlightenment is a talk about the age of enlightenment. One of the reasons for always thinking of the Enlightenment in a historical context can be sought in the apparent importance of the social mobility that this thought created. Enlightenment, with its scientific methodology that directs the way of thinking, and the artistic forms it uses in the transfer of thought to society, has been more effective on people than other intellectual movements.

The study, which consists of two parts, first begins by examining the thoughts that will form the philosophical background to the idea of enlightenment. For this purpose, the thoughts of philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant are examined in this section. In the second part, the thinkers who will develop the enlightenment culture with intellectual and artistic works, inspired by the philosophies of the mentioned philosophers, are examined. Voltaire, D'Alembert, Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are some of these thinkers. Reason-based evaluations of these thinkers on the concepts of God, ethics, politics, and society are examined in this section.