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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 2, Mathematics and the Exact Sciences.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Who became the leading literary figure of the Enlightenment and in 1734 published "Philosophical Letters"?
(a) Newton.
(b) Breteuil.
(c) Voltaire.
(d) Chatelet.

2. According to Chapter 1, ________, in 1747, attributed the cause of a "great revolution in physics" to Newton's "Principia."
(a) Alexis-Claude Clairaut.
(b) Malebranche.
(c) Descartes.
(d) Maupertuis.

3. In the preface to his "Histoire" of the Paris Academy of Science, who argued in 1699 that the new "geometric spirit" could also improve works on politics, morals, literary criticism, and even public speaking?
(a) Leibniz.
(b) Fontenelle.
(c) Newton.
(d) Varignon.

4. Who stated in the introduction to their book that, "There are no figures in this book. The methods that I demonstrate here require neither constructions, nor geometrical or mechanical reasoning, but only algebraic operations, subject to a regular and uniform development"?
(a) Hermann.
(b) Lagrange.
(c) Basel.
(d) Euler.

5. According to the narrator in Chapter 1, who was one of the originators of the mechanical philosophy who believed there were no forces or powers in matter?
(a) Bernoulli.
(b) Descartes.
(c) Leibniz.
(d) Carnot.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who carried rational mechanics to the highest point of generality and abstraction that it was to reach during the Enlightenment?

2. What area of study in the Middle Ages had been the domain of those truths that could be found through the use of reason alone without the revelation of the Bible?

3. Who claimed a community of atheists could live a completely moral existence, according to Chapter 1 of the book "Science and the Enlightenment"?

4. Who came out in support of vis viva in 1722 and concluded that "what was before only a dispute of words now becomes a dispute about real things"?

5. Who was France's greatest hero of the Enlightenment partly because he was from England, the source of free thought and liberty and partly because he had solved the riddle of the planets, showing that their motions obeyed the same laws as motions on earth?

(see the answer key)

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