Western Enlightenment in the context of "History of Western civilization"

The Scottish Enlightenment (Scots: Scots Enlichtenment, Scottish Gaelic: Soillseachadh na h-Alba) was the period in 18th- and early-19th-century Scotland characterised by an outpouring of intellectual and scientific accomplishments. By the eighteenth century, Scotland had a network of parish schools in the Scottish Lowlands and five universities. The Enlightenment culture was based on close readings of new books, and intense discussions which took place daily at such intellectual gathering places in Edinburgh as The Select Society and, later, The Poker Club, as well as within Scotland's ancient universities (St Andrews, Glasgow, Edinburgh, King's College, and Marischal College).

Sharing the humanist and rational outlook of the Western Enlightenment of the same time period, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment asserted the importance of human reason combined with a rejection of any authority that could not be justified by reason. In Scotland, the Enlightenment was characterised by a thoroughgoing empiricism and practicality where the chief values were improvement, virtue, and practical benefit for the individual and society as a whole.

The Spanish Enlightenment (Spanish: la Ilustración española) was an 18th-century intellectual and cultural movement that was part of the broader Western Enlightenment.

The ideas of the Enlightenment came to Spain with the new Bourbon dynasty, following the death of the last Habsburg monarch, Charles II, in 1700. The period of reform and 'enlightened despotism' under the eighteenth-century Bourbons focused on centralizing the power of the Spanish government, and improvement of infrastructure, beginning with the rule of King Charles III and the work of his minister, José Moñino, count of Floridablanca. In the political and economic sphere, the crown implemented a series of changes, collectively known as the Bourbon reforms, which were aimed at making the overseas Spanish Empire more prosperous to the benefit of Spain.

In modern and contemporary Western philosophy, an enlightenment (German: Aufklärung; plural: Aufklärungen) refers to any historically situated process in which individuals or societies use reason to overcome ignorance and to shape their own development. The concept originates with Immanuel Kant's 1784 essay, "Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?", in which he defined enlightenment as "man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity". A thinker who participates in or promotes such a process may be called an enlightener (German: Aufklärer).

While the term often evokes "the" Western Enlightenment of the late 17th and 18th centuries, contemporary philosophers such as Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) and Michel Foucault (1926–1984) have emphasized that there are multiple, context-specific enlightenments. For example, in his 1984 work "What Is Enlightenment?" (drawing on Kant's 1784 essay), Foucault refers to different enlightenments as varied and situated practices of critique and rationality across human history. The Jewish Haskalah, sometimes called the "Jewish Enlightenment" or the "Jewish Aufklärung", is another such example of a culturally distinct enlightenment.