The Birth of the Modern Mind: The Intellectual History of the 17th and 18th Centuries Course Guidebook

The conceptual revolution of the 17th century was above all a series of philosophical clashes over abstract and fundamental issues, although its outcome was far from abstract. In the 18th century, the heirs of that conceptual
revolution—the “new philosophers”—both popularized what they took to be the substance and implications of what had occurred in the 17th century and extended them to new areas of inquiry. They also dealt in various ways
with the dramatic implications of the new philosophy for essential religious issues: miracle, revelation, supernaturalism, the authority of the priesthood, human nature, sin, and virtue. They sought to understand both society and religion in increasingly natural terms, to establish the rights of freedom of inquiry and belief, and to discredit, reform, or replace those authorities that could not justify themselves by the new criteria and proper uses of knowledge. In these endeavors, 18th-century thinkers effected a genuine cultural transformation more revolutionary than anything that occurred in the social or political life of 18th-century Europe. It would be false to attribute unintended consequences to the systems of thought from which these arose, but it is crucial to human understanding to know what have been, in fact, the consequences of ideas. This course will put us at the heart of the most far-reaching and consequential intellectual changes in the history of European civilization.