APWH Unit 5 Vocabulary

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Enlightenment

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A movement in the 18th century that advocated the use of reason in the reappraisal of accepted ideas and social institutions.

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Social Contract Theory

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The belief that people are free and equal by natural right, and that this in turn requires that all people give their consent to be governed; if the government is unjust, the people have the right to revolt.

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Philosophes

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Thinkers of the Enlightenment; wanted to educate the socially elite, but not the masses; were not allowed to openly criticize church or state, so used satire and double-meaning in their writings to avoid being banned.

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Salons

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Gatherings in which intellectual and political ideas were exchanged during the Enlightenment.

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Thomas Hobbes

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English philosopher and political theorist best known for his book Leviathan (1651), in which he argues that the only way to secure civil society is through universal submission to the absolute authority of a sovereign.

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Francis Bacon

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(1561-1626) English politician, writer. Formalized the empirical/scientific method.

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Isaac Newton

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English mathematician and scientist who invented differential calculus and formulated the theory of universal gravitation, a theory about the nature of light, and three laws of motion. His treatise on gravitation, presented in Principia Mathematica (1687), was supposedly inspired by the sight of a falling apple.

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Johannes Kepler

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German astronomer and mathematician of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, known as the founder of celestial mechanics.

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Galileo Galilei

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Italian astronomer and mathematician who was the first to use a telescope to study the stars.

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Medieval Scholasticism

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A philosophical and theological system, associated with Thomas Aquinas, devised to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy and Roman Catholic theology in the thirteenth century.