What are the main features of the Enlightenment?
The most useful term in understanding the broad term ‘Enlightenment’ is its singular emphasis on the omnicompetence of reason in yielding an adequate understanding of the physical, moral and intellectual world. As in earlier movements the stress is on its method rather than any specific content, as this will vary according to each thinker. The method of the Enlightenment was founded on its confidence that human reason had few or no limits in the scope of its understanding. This places it in contrast to scholasticism that limited, by and large, reason to the realm of nature leaving ‘super’-nature, such as God and human identity, to revelation. The Enlightenment shared the rationalist project, found in Descartes and others, that the external world could be understood solely by the use of reason alone. However, the Enlightenment, in response to the empiricist challenge such as David Hume’s to Kant, also expanded the range of rational investigation to the ‘internal’ world of thought (epist
