Socratess repeated assertion that he knew nothing was echoed in Voltaires insistence that the true philosopher is the one who dares not to know and then has the courage to admit his ignorance publicly. Philosophy was also a part of this mix, and during the Regency the young Voltaire was especially shaped by his contacts with the English aristocrat, freethinker,and Jacobite Lord Bolingbroke. In the 1730s, he drafted a poem called Le Mondain that celebrated hedonistic worldly living as a positive force for society, and not as the corrupting element that traditional Christian morality held it to be. ), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2007. Voltaire was famous for being a writer, historian, and a philosopher known for his wittiness, his attacks on the Catholic Church, and his support of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and separation of church and state. Voltaire worked to defend Civil Liberties. But unlike the authors of these overtly fictionalized accounts, Voltaire innovated by adopting a journalistic stance instead, one that offered readers an empirically recognizable account of several aspects of English society. During this scene, when the country men decide to offer human sacrifices to prevent future earthquakes (Voltaire 14) the author exposes the prideful and depraved aspects of unredeemed, human nature according to scripture. Religious Criticism: Voltaire's Fanaticism In Religious Tolerance This stance distanced Voltaire from the republican politics of Toland and other materialists, and Voltaire echoed these ideas in his political musings, where he remained throughout his life a liberal, reform-minded monarchist and a skeptic with respect to republican and democratic ideas. This argument would famously awake Kants dogmatic slumbers and lead to the reconstitution of transcendental philosophy in new terms, but Voltaire had different fish to fry. Who Were the Enlightenment Philosophers? Flashcards | Quizlet This approach lead to the vortical account of celestial mechanics, a view that held material bodies to be swimming in an ethereal sea whose action pushed and pulled objects in the manner we observe. London: Penguin Books, 2002. Despite his belief that a perfect world did not exist, he did create a utopia in one of his most well-known pieces of prose, Candide. In Candide, he critiqued the philosophy of metaphysical optimism. In clarifying this new distinction between science and philosophy, and especially in fighting vigorously for it in public campaigns directed against the perceived enemies of fanaticism and superstition, Voltaire pointed modern philosophy down several paths that it subsequently followed. Voltaire. What was Voltaire's ideas on individual freedoms? Candide Chapters 17-19 Summary & Analysis | SparkNotes How did Voltaire view human nature? It was largely around Maupertuis that the young cohort of French academic Newtonians gathered during the Newton wars of 1730s and 40s, and with Voltaire fighting his own public campaigns on behalf of this same cause during the same period, the two men became the most visible faces of French Newtonianism even if they never really worked as a team in this effort.
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