Browse Items (202 total)

Adam Smith’s quintessential work of classical economic philosophy, Wealth of Nations, is seen as one of the most influential philosophical works of the entire Enlightenment era. In it, Smith bashes Mercantilist economic policies for their backward,…

Philosopher Immanuel Kant defined the Enlightenment, an 18th century intellectual movement, as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed…inability to use…understanding without another’s guidance” (Jacob 203). Kant argues that there are two ways to use…

In 1516, English humanist Thomas More published one of his most famous and controversial works, a novel called Utopia. In it, More described an independent, law-abiding community living on an island. His community was devoid of crime and…

Juan Luis Vives was a Spanish humanist who wrote about reforming the church and deepening spiritual life. One of his most prominent works was “Three Books on the Soul and Life,” a collection of writings about the soul and its relationship to the…

This is the title page of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which was published in 1792. Wollstonecraft was a prolific English writer and powerful advocate for women’s rights, as the title of this book suggests. Chapter XII,…

In the face of a proliferation of Protestant books and other writings across the European continent, the papacy created the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, “the Index of Banned Books.” By outlawing the ownership and reading of works that expressed…

The first documented case of European tobacco initiation came in 1518 during Juan de Grijalva’s expedition of the Yucatán Peninsula (Norton, 48). As such, tobacco was initially viewed as a brokering tool, not as a commodity. Yet, it gradually grew in…

This large architectural project took Michelangelo and many assistants four decades to complete from the date of its commissioning. In fact, it was completed in a radically different form than originally envisioned over thirty years after its…

What is now the Royal Palace of Amsterdam was originally inaugurated in 1665 as the Town Hall of the City of Amsterdam, to be the "eighth wonder of the world". With the newfound independence from Spain thanks to the Peace of Westphalia, and with the…

In Chapter 6 of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government about paternal power, he mentioned that the phrase “paternal power” seems to “place the power of parents over their children wholly in the father, as though the mother had no share in it; whereas…

In John Locke’s “Two Treatises of Government,” he breaks-down and refutes the argument of rival political philosopher Robert Filmer and establishes the framework for contract theory in civil society and the government. Specifically, in his second…

An item of crucial importance to the Protestant Reformation was the printing press. The Reformation was a popular movement, which meant that people had to know about it and be taught what the reformers stood for. Bringing this information to the…