Enlightenment and Empiricism

Descartes - "I think therefore I am"

New rational philosophies and mathematics - the Empiricist ideal of the 'clockwork universe' - Newton.

Start of the printing press – Gutenburg. His printing press allowed the spread of ideas in a very new way, similar to the revolution of the internet. Original printing press was a bible-printing machine. Protestant reformation: Martin Luthor wanted everyone to be able to read the Bible in their own language, and so the spread of Protestantism helped to spread literacy. From there, the printing press allowed all sorts of things to be published en masse: novels, scientific treatises, even porn, were invented in their printed form within 200 years of the original Gutenberg press. There was an explosion of literature, especially in Holland, then the most free country in Europe.

Courants printed in Holland during the English civil war were the first periodicals. These were mostly propaganda

Press – Addison and Steel – involved in the early bourgeoisie trade and adverts. "Win Free Sex" as a template was first invented by these early journalists, whose papers advertised easy money ventures and the likes to make money themselves. So the recogniseable tropes of a newspaper were set, and can still be seen today in the contents of modern papers.

Empiricism – knowledge can only come from the 'five senses'. All comes from without. Everything can be analysed. Empiricism is opposite Idealism, where all things comes from within.

Thomas Hobbs was the father of Empiricism . Odeas of the state – non-moralistic empiricist view of human behaviour – humans live to maximise pleasure and minimise pain.

John Locke – people are tabula rasa at birth – blank slate. Once again, all things come from without. This would later be contradicted by the great skeptics, namely Freud.

Adam Smith – empiricist view of economics – seeking of pleasure/avoiding of pain – utility economics – everyone tries to maximise utility – his classical economic theories were the foundation of all economic understanding until Keynes turned his ideas upside down.

David Hume – Essay Concerning Human Understanding – How do you derive complex/abstract ideas from sense-data? He asks how we can synthesise ideas from simpler ones – something Wittgenstein would pick up centuries later, as to how simple objects form complex atoms.