ENLIGHTENMENT

Question 1

In a 1784 essay what did Immanuel Kant proclaim as Enlightenment’s motto?

Answer 1

“Dare to understand!”

its foundational demand is freedom of thought and speech.

Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now (p. 7). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Question 2

The enlightenment era was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but 4 themes tie them together.

What are they?

Answer 2

• Reason
• Science
• Humanism
• Progress.

Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now (p. 8). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Question 3

How does enlightenment ideas define humanism?

Answer 3

• A view that privileges the well-being of individual men, women, and children over the glory of the tribe, race, nation, or religion.
• It is individuals, not groups, who are sentient—who feel pleasure and pain, fulfillment and anguish.

Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now (p. 10). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Question 4

Pinker suggest that there 3 critical ideas about the human condition and the nature of progress that we know that the enlightenment thinkers didn’t

What are they?

Answer 4

• Entropy (Entro)
• Evolution (Evo)
• Information (Info)

Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now (p. 14). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Question 5

What is the 2nd law of thermodynamics?

Answer 5

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in an isolated system (one that is not interacting with its environment), entropy never decreases.

Closed systems inexorably become less structured, less organized, less able to accomplish interesting and useful outcomes, until they slide into an equilibrium of gray, tepid, homogeneous monotony and stay there.

Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now (p. 15). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Question 6

How is entropy relevant to human affairs?

Answer 6

“Life and happiness depend on an infinitesimal sliver of orderly arrangements of matter amid the astronomical number of possibilities.”

Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now (p. 16). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Question 7

Moral reasoning requires that one apply 2 congnitive disciplines.

What are they?

.

Answer 7

• proportionality
  
  • mean twitter comment are not the same as the slave trade or the holocaust​
• distinguishing rhetororic from reality.​
  • Marching into a rape crisis center and demanding to know what they have done about the rape of the environment does nothing for rape victims and nothing for the environment.

Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now (p. 47). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edtion