View a FREE sample

This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 1, The Character of the Enlightenment.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What was the name of the philosopher who was the leading scientific experimenter in seventeenth-century England, who had agreed that he had never seen any "inanimate production of nature, or of chance, whose contrivance was comparable to that of the meanest limb of the despicabilist animal"?
(a) Galileo.
(b) Locke.
(c) Swift.
(d) Robert Boyle.

2. What was the name of the priest of the Congregation of the Oratory, who was also a philosopher, mathematician, and member of the French Academy of Sciences?
(a) Chatelet.
(b) Newton.
(c) Descartes.
(d) Nicolas Malebranche.

3. According to Chapter 1, the noble Houyhnhnm in Jonathan Swift's ________ "thought Nature and Reason were sufficient guides for a reasonable animal, as we pretended to be, in showing us what we ought to do, and what to avoid."
(a) Twelve Articles.
(b) Gulliver's Travels.
(c) The Day of Judgement.
(d) A Modest Proposal.

4. In 1688, Fontenelle wrote a treatise on the nature of the eclogue or ________.
(a) Limerick.
(b) Sonnet.
(c) Pastoral poem.
(d) Haiku.

5. Chapter 1 states that in 1700, ________ first talked about an "almost complete revolution in geometry" that had begun with the analytic geometry of Descartes.
(a) Leibniz.
(b) Cartesians.
(c) Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle.
(d) D'Alembert.

Short Answer Questions

1. Madame du Chatelet supported the Leibnizian theory of ________ because it gave a better account of free will.

2. Which German metaphysician, when asked in 1785 if he believed he lived in an enlightened age, answered, "No, we are living in an age of enlightenment."

3. According to the beginning of Chapter 1, in 1759 the French mathematician ________ described a revolution that he saw taking place in natural philosophy.

4. According to the narrator in Chapter 1, what was the key to a correct method whose model was mathematics?

5. According to Chapter 1, who made Newton into a supreme rationalist whose laws of motion were a priori deductions of pure thought?

(see the answer key)

This section contains 305 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample