Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment, also called the Age of Reason or simply the Enlightenment, was a period of intellectual and cultural flourishing in Europe and the wider Western world that emerged in the late seventeenth century and peaked in the eighteenth. Marked by an emphasis on reason, empirical evidence and the scientific method, it promoted individual liberty, religious tolerance, progress and natural rights, and its thinkers argued for constitutional government, the separation of church and state and the rational reform of society and politics. It grew out of the Scientific Revolution and drew on philosophers such as René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza and John Locke. Historians have dated its beginning to Descartes's Discourse on the Method of 1637, to Newton's Principia of 1687, or to the death of Louis XIV in 1715, and its end to the French Revolution of 1789 or as late as the death of Immanuel Kant in 1804. For literature it matters as the setting of works such as Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration and Montesquieu's writings.