And then, the world exploded.
First, let’s spend some time with the people. Big shifts were happening among the intelligentsia and nobility, but there were also average people–peasants, witches, enslaved folks–who went about their lives feeling the after effects of the revolutions but maybe not all at once and maybe not in any meaningful way. (I think about how the PC was invented somewhere in the 1970s-80s, depending on who you ask, but my middle-class family didn’t get a computer till 1995.)
The assertion of “I think, therefore I am.” The beginning of global imperialism. The Scientific Revolution and the bloody French Revolution, American Revolution.
This week and next, we are spending time in modernity and the Enlightenment (and I, probably unfairly, use those terms interchangeably!). It’s a huge chunk of time, so to help us wrap our brains around it, I made the infographic above.
- Listen to A Curious Disputation, Season 2 Ep 4
- Read Livingston & Schüssler Fiorenza, Modern Christian Thought
- Read Barstow, Witchcraze
- Read Todd, “Thomas Hobbes on Human Nature” (Beyond the Pale)
- Read Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy*
- Turn in your Modern Thought Reading Response to Populi
- Guiding question for your RR: What are some of the major shifts in thought that occurred in and around Descartes’ lifetime?