Summary of Anthony Gottlieb's The Dream of Enlightenment - E-book - ePub

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The seeds of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment were sown in the seventeenth century, when some people began to think that history was the wrong way round. It was not Plato and Aristotle who were the ancients to be revered, but the admirable ancients are us. #2 Bacon was an advocate of careful and systematic observation, and he adopted as the mascot of the Royal Society of London, one of Europe's first clubs of scientific investigators. #3 Descartes was a particularly knowledgeable man, but he is more famous for what he claimed to doubt than what he actually knew.
He asked how he could be certain that he was not dreaming, and how he could be certain that some deceitful demon was not filling his head with falsehoods. #4 Descartes was able to speak with authority about the new science, as he was one of its principal authors. He built a unified account of nature that was as all-encompassing as Aristotle's, but based on the un-Aristotelian mechanical principle that physical phenomena are to be explained in terms of contact between moving bodies and the motions and shapes of their parts.