Email this article 
An Expansive View of Truth and a Non-Pessimistic Conception of Human Nature: The Form and Content of Enlightenment Philosophy
Abstract
This article characterizes the Enlightenment by identifying it on a formal level with an expansive view of truth and on a content-level with a non-pessimistic conception of human nature. These two traits differentiate the Enlightenment from other forms of free thought that were already present in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In particular, they differentiate it from Libertinism, in which, on the level of content, it is possible to find many of the theses later advocated by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. For instance, regarding religious issues, we already find beliefs of a deist, atheist and agnostic nature developed in the libertine thought. But in the libertine vision such truths were not to be disseminated. They were to remain the secret patrimony of the aristocratic elite, since it was socially and politically dangerous for people to learn that revealed religions are false or that God does not exist. Moreover, in the libertine thought we find a pessimistic conception of human nature. With the Enlightenment both characteristics of the freethinking prevalent in the seventeenth century disappear.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Bayle, Pierre. Dictionnaire historique et critique [1697, 1704 second edition]. English translation, with the title The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle. London, Knapton, 1734. Reprint New York: Garland Publishing, 1984.
Bayle, Pierre. Pensées diverses sur le comète [1682]. English translation: Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000.
Cohen, Joshua. Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
D’Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry. Essai sur les préjugés, ou De l’influence des opinions sur les moeurs & le bonheur des hommes [1770]. Paris: Coda, 2007.
D’Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry. Système de la nature, ou des Lois du Monde Physique et du Monde Moral [1770)]. 2 volumes; English translation: System of Nature, edited by Robert D. Richardson. New York: Garland Press, 1984.
D’Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry. Le Bons Sense [1772]. Paris: Editions rationalists, 1971.
Diderot, Denis. Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature [1754]. Paris: Flammarion, 2005.
Filangeri, Gaetano. La scienza della legislazione. Mariano del Friuli: Laguna, 2003–2004.
Fontanelle, Bernard Le Bouvier de. Nouvelles libertés de penser [1743]. In Oeuvres Complètes de Fontenelle, edited by Georges-Bernard Depping. Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1968.
Fréret, Nicolas. Lettre de Thrasibule à Leucippe, edited by Sergio Landucci, Firenze: Olschky, 1986.
Helvétius, Claude-Adrien. De l’homme, de ses facultés intellectuelles et de son éducation [1772]. English translation: A Treatise of Man, His Intellectual Faculties and His Education. New York: Franklin, 1969.
Hobbes, Thomas. De Cive. Edited by Howard Warrender. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan [1651]. In Leviathan, with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668, edited by Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994.
Hume, David. An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals [1751]. Chicago: Open Court, 1930.
Huxley, Thomas Henry. Agnosticism: A Symposium. In The Agnostic Annual, edited by Charles Watt. London: Cattell, 1884.
Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft [1781, revised second edition 1787]. English translation: Critique of Pure Reason, edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Landucci, Sergio. I filosofi e i selvaggi. Torino: Einaudi, 2014.
La Mettrie, Julien Offray de. L’homme machine [1748]. English translation: Man a Machine. La Salle, ILL.: Open Court Press, 1912.
Melzer, Arthur M. The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau’s Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Paganini, Gianni. La philosophie clandestine. Paris: Puf, 2005.
Pomponazzi, Pietro. Tractatus de immortalitate animae (On the Immortality of the Soul) [1516]. French translation: Traité de l’immortalitaté de l’âme, edited by Thierry Gontier. Paris: Les Belle Lettres, 2012.
Pascal, Blaise. Pensées [1670]. French edition, edited by Phillippe Sellier. Paris: Bordas/Classiques Garnier, 1991. English translation in Pensées and Other Writings, edited by Anthony Levi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Rousseau, Jean-Jaques. Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes [1755]. English translation: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing, 1992.
Rousseau, Jean-Jaques. Émile, ou de l’éducation [1762]. English translation: Emile or On Education, edited by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1979.
Voltaire, Lettres écrites de Londres sur les Anglois et autres sujets [1734]. English translation: Philosophical Letters. Or, Letters Regarding the English Nations, edited by John Leigh, and Prudence L. Steiner. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2007.
Voltaire, Traité sur la tolérance [1763]. English translation: A Treatise on Tolerance and Other Writings, edited by Brian Masters. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/kw.2025.39.9-22
Date of publication: 2025-08-13 14:59:42
Date of submission: 2025-04-29 02:07:15
Statistics
Indicators
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
Copyright (c) 2025 Francesco Allegri
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.