Immanuel Kant  (German, 1724-1804)

	> What Is the Enlightenment? 1784: "Dare to know" (sapere aude > Horace) Dare to reason independently & question authority - of tradition, received knowledge, status quo (e.g. authority of Church, divine right of monarchs to rule, privilege of aristocracy)
	> Critique of Pure Reason, 1781: Questioned the power of Reason to provide the most significant forms of knowledge.  Feeling might offer a powerful guide as individuals engage in ethical struggle to locate and experience the good.  Individualism:  Authority may be located in the self, rather than in society.

Denis Diderot (France, 1713-1784)

	French philosophes--including Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, & Rousseau--advocate "rational thought, empirical observation, and sensibility to correct the errors of the present and to construct a better, more just, and more humane world operating in better harmony with the laws of nature" (Davis 13).
	Leading "' a revolution in the minds of men to free them from prejudice'" (Diderot qtd. in Davis, 397), Diderot directed writing and publication of the multi-volume Encyclopédie, from 1751-1772, featuring "articles on science, mathematics, literature, art, technology, history, and society" that subject to the critical eye of Reason "all that could be explained and understood in and about the universe" (Davis 378).  "All things must be examined without sparing anyone's sensibilities," Diderot declares (qtd. in Davis 380), and Encyclopédie articles embed attacks on legal, clerical, and social abuses in pre-revolutionary France, that would pave the way for the French Revolution.
	Circa 1770, Diderot began writing the Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville as a review of Louis Antoine de Bougainville's travel accounts (Davis 380).  In the Supplement, Diderot contrasts the "natural law" of sexual freedom followed by the Tahitians, to the artificial "civil and religious laws" of monogamy espoused by European religion and culture.  Diderot exposes European "hypocrisy, tyranny, and self-righteousness" that result from waging a tortuous and unwinnable "internal civil war" between powerful natural desires and artificial moral impositions and constraints" (Davis 380, 381).

Thomas Jefferson (U.S.A. 1743-1826)

	Influenced by Enlightenment philosophy, Jefferson "believed that people who had access to free education and had the support of democratic institutions could best govern themselves" (Davis 521).
	In the "Declaration of Independence" (1776), Jefferson constructed a rational, logical three-part argument to support the American colonies' revolution to obtain independence from England, founded upon "self-evident truths about human equality and the human rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" that belong to individuals in "a state of nature" (Davis 522).

Mary Wollstonecraft (U.K. 1757-1797)

"In the celebrated Age of Reason, with its emphasis upon liberty and independence, [Wollstonecraft] argued, women had been left out of the picture" (Davis 525).  Wollstonecraft applies Enlightenment and revolutionary arguments--originally intended to apply only to disenfranchised men--to criticize social and economic injustices to women.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) deplores the current inferior state of female education, which "prepares [females] only for superficial conversation, shallow thinking, and ornamental accomplishments" and ensures female inferiority as less than rational creatures (Davis 525).  Instead, Wollstonecraft demands recognition of women's "natural powers of reason" and the development of these powers through reformed female education that improves "our minds" and prepares "our affections for a more exalted state"  (Davis 525).

Olaudah Equiano (Igbo-UK, 1747-1797) - Week #2
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African (1789)