The Enlightenment, which usually is described as having taken place during the 18th century, helped to fabricate the momentum which led to so many of today’s modern ideologies. The theme of reform, and individualism greatly led the way through these times, helping the individual spirits of Europe to break free from the medieval customs, but, ...
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Physicists flock from all over the world to take part in the massive collaboration founded to study fundamental particles and their collisions. The best and the brightest combine their knowledge and ideas at CERN to better understand matter, the Universe, ...
Aspiring Francophiles are not the only ones who can appreciate these interesting observations and witticisms made by French thinkers throughout the centuries. As in an earlier collection touching upon the same subject, these well-known and not so well-known French quotations touch upon a wide variety of topics which bring to light some striking similarities in ...
Introduction Spurred by the American and French Revolutions, enlightenment was an era of new and modern forms of thought and expression. The driving force behind this movement was the ideal that, “human affairs ought to be ruled by reason and the common good, rather than by tradition and established authority.” (Janson & Janson, 2004, p. ...
Candide is a story of the forlorn misadventures of a Baron’s illegitimate nephew. At an early age, he adopts an unconquerable optimistic view of the world from his tutor, the obdurate Pangloss. Throughout the insufferable torment of their lives, Candide and Pangloss manage to retain their oft-discredited philosophy. Voltaire, the author of the book, wrote ...
This paper is a short essay addressing the protagonist of Voltaire’s conte, Candide, and his (Candide’s) enlightenment to the fallacies of the philosophy of Optimism. This relatively short novelette provided Voltaire a platform to satire Leibniz’s Optimism as well as incorporate some of Voltaire’s other views on life. The key questions addressed by this paper ...
The world was a tumultuous place in the 1700’s. Wars were fought, corruption was rampant, and a wave of philosophers were beginning to question the social order in a barrage of thought which we now know as the Enlightenment. Most men, while picking out their own convictions from the torrent of ideas swirling about in ...
Like a lamp shining in a dark room, the philosophy of Enlightenment was supposed to open the eyes of the world’s poor and free them from unjust rule. Excited writers and poets believed the spirit of Enlightenment could lift the world from an age of darkness and ignorance into a world of science, rationality and ...
The tone and theme of Candide, a classic work of literature, make the novel relevant to today’s modern world. These two elements of the story bring the classic to life for new generations to relate to as they read it. The satiric story unites a new generation of modern readers to a distant past as ...
Candide, is a philosophical book by Voltaire published in Geneva in January 1759. It was reissued twenty times the lifetime of Voltaire making it one of the most successful French literary works. Candide was first published anonymously in 1759, Candide was then attributed to a “Mr. Doctor Ralph” in 1761, following the reshuffle of the ...
