During the Enlightenment (also called the Age of Reason), man's confidence in his ability to reason rose to heights not seen since the Ancient Greeks and arguably unsurpassed to this day. Although the term is typically used to describe eighteenth-century intellectual developments, the Enlightenment is largely an extension and expansion of seventeenth-century thinking. We begin, therefore, by reviewing some of the major intellectual developments of the seventeenth century.

Seventeenth-Century Foundations of the Enlightenment

Rationalism, Empiricism, and Scientific Methodology

During the Renaissance, the attention of scholars focused heavily on the humanities. By the middle of the sixteenth century, “the awakening” that demarcates the Renaissance had fully spread to the sciences. A Scientific Revolution began that continued through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it has continued more or less uninterrupted until the present day. We have already discussed the advances in astronomy by Kepler and Galileo at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In the life sciences, the major accomplishment was William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of blood (De Moto cordis et sanguinis, 1628).