The Enlightenment in the context of "Religious tolerance"

Christian Wolff (/vɔːlf/; less correctly Wolf, German: [vɔlf]; also known as Wolfius; ennobled as Christian Freiherr von Wolff in 1745; 24 January 1679 – 9 April 1754) was a German philosopher. Wolff is characterized as one of the most eminent German philosophers between Leibniz and Kant. His life work spanned almost every scholarly subject of his time, displayed and unfolded according to his demonstrative-deductive, mathematical method, which some deem the peak of Enlightenment rationality in Germany.

Wolff wrote in German as his primary language of scholarly instruction and research, although he did translate his works into Latin for his transnational European audience. A founding father of, among other fields, economics and public administration as academic disciplines, he concentrated especially in these fields, giving advice on practical matters to people in government, and stressing the professional nature of university education.

Humanitas (from the Latin hūmānus, "human") is a Latin noun meaning human nature, civilization, and kindness. It has uses in the Enlightenment, which are discussed below.

Western civilization traces its roots back to Europe and the Mediterranean. It began in ancient Greece, transformed in ancient Rome, and evolved into medieval Western Christendom before experiencing such seminal developmental episodes as the development of Scholasticism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the development of liberal democracy. The civilizations of classical Greece and Rome are considered seminal periods in Western history. Major cultural contributions also came from the Christianized Germanic peoples, such as the Longobards, the Franks, the Goths, and the Burgundians. Charlemagne founded the Carolingian Empire and he is referred to as the "Father of Europe". Contributions also emerged from pagan peoples of pre-Christian Europe, such as the Celts and Germanic pagans as well as some significant religious contributions derived from Judaism and Hellenistic Judaism stemming back to Second Temple Judea, Galilee, and the early Jewish diaspora; and some other Middle Eastern influences. Western Christianity has played a prominent role in the shaping of Western civilization, which throughout most of its history, has been nearly equivalent to Christian culture. (There were Christians outside of the West, such as China, India, Russia, Byzantium and the Middle East). Western civilization has spread to produce the dominant cultures of modern Americas and Oceania, and has had immense global influence in recent centuries in many ways.

Following the 5th century Fall of Rome, Europe entered the Middle Ages, during which period the Catholic Church filled the power vacuum left in the West by the fall of the Western Roman Empire, while the Eastern Roman Empire (or Byzantine Empire) endured in the East for centuries, becoming a Hellenic Eastern contrast to the Latin West. By the 12th century, Western Europe was experiencing a flowering of art and learning, propelled by the construction of cathedrals, the establishment of medieval universities, and greater contact with the medieval Islamic world via Al-Andalus and Sicily, from where Arabic texts on science and philosophy were translated into Latin. Christian unity was shattered by the Reformation from the 16th century. A merchant class grew out of city states, initially in the Italian peninsula (see Italian city-states), and Europe experienced the Renaissance from the 14th to the 17th century, heralding an age of technological and artistic advance and ushering in the Age of Discovery which saw the rise of such global European empires as those of Portugal and Spain.

John Locke (/lɒk/; 29 August 1632 (O.S.) – 28 October 1704 (O.S.)) was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of the Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "father of liberalism". Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, Locke is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy.

His writings influenced Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American Revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence. Internationally, Locke's political-legal principles continue to have a profound influence on the theory and practice of limited representative government and the protection of basic rights and freedoms under the rule of law.

Change and continuity is a classic dichotomy within the fields of history, historical sociology, and the social sciences more broadly. The question of change and continuity is considered a classic discussion in the study of historical developments. The dichotomy is used to discuss and evaluate the extent to which a historical development or event represents a decisive historical change or whether a situation remains largely unchanged. A good example of this discussion is the question of how much the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 represents an important change in European history. In a similar vein, historian Richard Kirkendall once questioned whether FDR's New Deal represented "a radical innovation or a continuation of earlier themes in American life?" and posed the question of whether "historical interpretations of the New Deal [should] stress change or emphasize continuity?" The issue here is if the New Deal marks something radically new (change) in US history or if the New Deal can be understood as a continuation (continuity) of tendencies in American history that were in place well before the 1930.

The dichotomy is important in relation to constructing, discussing, and evaluating historical periodizations. In terms of creating and discussing periodization (e.g. the Enlightenment or the Victorian Era,) the dichotomy can be used to assess when a period can be said to start and end, thus making the dichotomy important in relation to understanding historical chronology. Economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron has taken issue with the dichotomy, arguing that continuity "appears to mean no more than absence of change, i.e. stability." German historian Reinhart Koselleck, however, has been said to challenge this dichotomy.

The Italian Enlightenment (Italian: l'Illuminismo italiano) refers to the intellectual and cultural movement that flourished in Italy during the second half of the 18th century as part of the broader Enlightenment (historically known in Italian as l'Illuminismo). The movement was characterized by the discussion of the epistemological, ethical, and political issues of the time.

The German Enlightenment (German: die deutsche Aufklärung) refers to the intellectual and cultural movement that flourished in the 18th-century German states as part of the broader Enlightenment (historically known in German as die Aufklärung).

Prussia took the lead among the German states in sponsoring the political reforms that Enlightenment thinkers urged absolute rulers to adopt. There were important movements as well in the smaller states of Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, and the Palatinate, although the Protestant regions were globally more active in the German Enlightenment than the Catholic ones. In each case, Enlightenment values became accepted and led to significant political and administrative reforms that laid the groundwork for the creation of modern states.

The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry is a 1973 book by Harold Bloom on the anxiety of influence in writing poetry. It was the first in a series of books that advanced a new "revisionary" or antithetical approach to literary criticism. Bloom's central thesis is that poets are hindered in their creative process by the ambiguous relationship they necessarily maintain with precursor poets. While admitting the influence of extraliterary experience on every poet, he argues that "the poet in a poet" is inspired to write by reading another poet's poetry and will tend to produce work that is in danger of being derivative of existing poetry, and, therefore, weak. Because poets historically emphasize an original poetic vision in order to guarantee their survival into posterity, the influence of precursor poets inspires a sense of anxiety in living poets. Thus Bloom attempts to work out the process by which the small minority of 'strong' poets manage to create original work in spite of the pressure of influence. Such an agon (a vain attempt by a writer to resolve the conflict between his ideas and those of a much more influential predecessor), Bloom argues, depends on six revisionary ratios, which reflect Freudian and quasi-Freudian defense mechanisms, as well as the tropes of classical rhetoric.

Before writing this book, Bloom spent a decade studying the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century. This is reflected in the emphasis given to those poets and their struggle with the influence of John Milton, Robert Burns, and Edmund Spenser. Other poets analyzed range from Lucretius and Dante to Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery. In The Anxiety of Influence and other early books, Bloom claimed that influence was particularly important for post-enlightenment poets. Conversely, he suggested that influence might have been less of a problem for such poets as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Bloom later changed his mind, and the most recent editions of The Anxiety of Influence include a preface claiming that Shakespeare was troubled early in his career by the influence of Christopher Marlowe. The book itself is divided into six major categories, called "six revisionary ratios" by Bloom. They are clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, and apophrades.