Science and the Enlightenment Study Guide & Plot Synopsis

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Science and the Enlightenment is an intellectual and scientific history of the great flowering of scientific and philosophic thought during the 18th century in Europe, the period known as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was both an important and radical break with tradition and the foundation of modern science and thought. This book documents that development.

At the outset of the Enlightenment, thinkers were beginning to rebel and move beyond the stifling dogma of Aristotelian thought that had been enforced by the Catholic church since the 11th century. It is no surprise that Enlightenment thought grew out of the work of two Englishmen, who lived in a land that had divorced itself from the Catholic Church. It was Newton and Bacon who developed many of the ideas that led to the Enlightenment both advocating the adoption of the inductive method of observation and theorizing and...
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