The summary here, therefore, will be largely restricted to scholarly books, with only a few articles of singular import listed. The kingdom has an advanced educational system and poverty is nonexistent. ), New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. This means Voltaire fought to make sure people were tolerant, to be tolerant it means you accept everyone for who they are. Trained in . In addition to his works of prose, his writings focused on challenging common beliefs at the time related to topics like military and political events. This result was no insignificant development since Voltaires financial independence effectively freed him from one dimension of the patronage system so necessary to aspiring writers and intellectuals in the period. Philosophie la Voltaire also came in the form of political activism, such as his public defense of Jean Calas who, Voltaire argued, was a victim of a despotic state and an irrational and brutal judicial system. hedonism | This royal office also triggered the writing of arguably Voltaires most widely read and influential book, at least in the eighteenth century, Essais sur les moeurs et lesprit des nations (1751), a pioneering work of universal history. But humans are also natural beings governed by inexorable natural laws, and his ethics anchored right action in a self that possessed the natural light of reason immanently. He believed that if we would focus more on knowledge and rational thought . The book was publicly burned by the royal hangman several months after its release, and this act turned Voltaire into a widely known intellectual outlaw. He also learned how to play the patronage game so important to those with writerly ambitions. First as a law student, then as a lawyers apprentice, and finally as a secretary to a French diplomat, Voltaire attempted to fulfill his fathers wishes. In 1729, the French government staged a sort of lottery to help amortize some of the royal debt. From early in his youth, Voltaire aspired to emulate his idols Molire, Racine, and Corneille and become a playwright, yet Voltaires father strenuously opposed the idea, hoping to install his son instead in a position of public authority. A comparison with David Humes role in this same development might help to illuminate the distinct contributions of each. Before it appeared, Voltaire attempted to get official permission for the book from the royal censors, a requirement in France at the time. Hellman, Lilian, 1980, Dorothy Parker, John La Touche, Richard Wilbur, and Leonard Bernstein, 19561957. Rather than returning home to Paris and restoring his reputation, Voltaire instead settled in Geneva. Voltaire positioned his Lettres philosophiques as an intervention into these controversies, drafting a famous and widely cited letter that used an opposition between Newton and Descartes to frame a set of fundamental differences between English and French philosophy at the time. Taylor (ed. This made him an advocate for the freedom to question. ), 2006. The absence of a singular text that anchors this linkage in Voltaires collected works in no way removes the unmistakable presence of Voltaires influence upon Kants formulation. Had this assimilationist trajectory continued during the remainder of Voltaires life, his legacy in the history of Western philosophy might not have been so great. As this polemic crystallized and grew in both energy and influence, Voltaire embraced its terms and made them his cause. Since Voltaire also coupled his explicitly philosophical writings and polemics during the 1730s and 1740s with an equally extensive stream of plays, poems, stories, and narrative histories, many of which were orthogonal in both tone and content to the explicit campaigns of the Newton Wars, Voltaire was further able to reestablish his old identity as an Old Regime man of letters despite the scandals of these years. Fawkener introduced Voltaire to a side of London life entirely different from that offered by Bolingbrokes circle of Tory intellectuals. By also attaching what many in the nineteenth century saw as Voltaires proto-positivism to his celebrated campaigns to eradicate priestly and aristo-monarchical authority through the debunking of the irrational superstitions that appeared to anchor such authority, Voltaires legacy also cemented the alleged linkage that joined positivist science on the one hand with secularizing disenchantment and dechristianization on the other. More specifically, Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau brought forward contrasting views on many different aspects of society, including: views on human nature, and the role of the government. In this way, Enlightenment philosophie became associated through Voltaire with the cultural and political program encapsulated in his famous motto, crasez linfme! (Crush the infamy!). The previous summary describes the general core of the Newtonian position in the intense philosophical contests of the first decades of the eighteenth century. He sided with Maupertuis, ordering Voltaire to either retract his libelous text or leave Berlin. This arrangement proved especially beneficial to Voltaire when scandal forced him to flee Paris and to establish himself permanently at the Du Chtelet family estate at Cirey. In particular, through his cultivation of a happily libertine persona, and his application of philosophical reason toward the moral defense of this identity, often through the widely accessible vehicles of poetry and witty prose, Voltaire became a leading force in the wider Enlightenment articulation of a morality grounded in the positive valuation of personal, and especially bodily, pleasure, and an ethics rooted in a hedonistic calculus of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. To take the philosopher in his training environment, Voltaire was a fair use of metaphysical truths he believed first acquired, without sacrificing his own strong conviction of causality demiurgic. Maupertuis had preceded Voltaire as the first aggressive advocate for Newtonian science in France. In 1740, responding to Du Chtelets efforts in her Institutions de physiques to reconnect metaphysics and physics through a synthesis of Leibniz with Newton, Voltaire made his opposition to such a project explicit in reviews and other essays he published. What was Voltaire's ideas on individual freedoms? Voltaire was certainly no great contributor to the political economic science that Smith practiced, but he did contribute to the wider philosophical campaigns that made the concepts of liberty and hedonistic morality central to their work both widely known and more generally accepted. A statue was commissioned as a permanent shrine to his legacy, and a public performance of his play Irne was performed in a way that allowed its author to be celebrated as a national hero. In the same period, Voltaire also composed a short book entitled La Metaphysique de Newton, publishing it in 1740 as an implicit counterpoint to Chtelets Institutions. Voltaire was very pessimistic of human nature. This stance distanced Voltaire from the republican politics of Toland and other materialists, and Voltaire echoed these ideas in his political musings, where he remained throughout his life a liberal, reform-minded monarchist and a skeptic with respect to republican and democratic ideas. Each side of this equation played a key role in defining the Enlightenment philosophie that Voltaire came to personify. Voltaire often used satire, mockery and wit to undermine the alleged rigor of philosophical dialectic, and while Socrates saw this kind of rhetorical word play as the very essence of the erroneous sophism that he sought to alleviate, Voltaire cultivated linguistic cleverness as a solvent to the false and deceptive dialectic that anchored traditional philosophy. In this respect, his philosophy as manifest in each was deeply indebted to the epistemological convictions he gleaned from Newtonianism. He also added personal invective and satire to this same position in his indictment of Maupertuis in the 1750s, linking Maupertuiss turn toward metaphysical approaches to physics in the 1740s with his increasingly deluded philosophical understanding and his authoritarian manner of dealing with his colleagues and critics. This act served as a tribute to the connections that the revolutionaries saw between Voltaires philosophical program and the cause of revolutionary modernization as a whole. Yet to fully understand the brand of philosophie that Voltaire made foundational to the Enlightenment, one needs to recognize that it just as often circulated in fictional stories, satires, poems, pamphlets, and other less obviously philosophical genres. Voltaire sheds light on the psychological idea of optomism versus pessimism. Newton, Isaac | At the center of his work was a new conception of philosophy and the philosopher that in several crucial respects influenced the modern concept of each. Voltaire also defined his own understanding of the soul in similar terms in his own Dictionnaire philosophique. In our opinion, the phenomenon of religion should be examined in the context of human nature and basic problems related to it such as the problem of soul and the problem of free will. This same hedonistic ethics was also crucial to the development of liberal political economy during the Enlightenment, and Voltaire applied his own libertinism toward this project as well. This book republished his articles from the original Encyclopdie while adding new entries conceived in the spirit of the original work. Ernest Dilworth (ed. His words and ideas were the impetus for scientific, political and social changes in Europe during the Enlightenment and popularized the works of other philosophers. In this program, the philosophes were not unified by any shared philosophy but through a commitment to the program of defending philosophie itself against its perceived enemies. In the definitive 1745 edition of his lments de la philosophie de Newton, Voltaire also appended his tract on Newtons metaphysics as the books introduction, thus framing his own understanding of the relationship between metaphysics and empirical science in direct opposition to Chtelets Leibnizian understanding of the same. Voltaire believed everyone had the right to liberty and hedonism. Voltaires views on religion as manifest in his private writings are complex, and based on the evidence of these texts it would be wrong to call Voltaire an atheist, or even an anti-Christian so long as one accepts a broad understanding of what Christianity can entail. At the one hand, Voltaire criticizes religion for its superstitions and fanaticism. How did Voltaire contribute to freedom of speech? Voltaire only began to identify himself with philosophy and the philosophe identity during middle age. London: Penguin Books, 2002. Voltaire worked to defend Civil Liberties. At the one hand, Voltaire criticizes religion for its superstitions and fanaticism. For similar reasons, he also grew as he matured ever more hostile toward the sacred mysteries upon which monarchs and Old Regime aristocratic society based their authority. Critics of Voltaire and his program for philosophie remained powerful, however, and they would continue to survive as the necessary backdrop to the positive image of the Enlightenment philosophe as a modernizer, progressive reformer, and courageous scourge against traditional authority that Voltaire bequeathed to later generations. The Newtonians countered that phenomenal descriptions were scientifically adequate so long as they were grounded in empirical facts, and since no facts had yet been discerned that explained what gravity is or how it works, no scientific account of it was yet possible. Translated by Peter Gay. He wrote as many plays, stories, and poems as patently philosophical tracts, and he in fact directed many of his critical writings against the philosophical pretensions of recognized philosophers such as Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes. Hume, David: Newtonianism and Anti-Newtonianism | How did Voltaire view human nature? Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project, 1998. In 1745, Voltaire was named the Royal Historiographer of France, a title bestowed upon him as a result of his histories of Louis XIV and the Swedish King Charles II. During these scandals, Voltaire fought vigorously alongside the projects editors to defend the work, fusing the Encyclopdies enemies, particularly the Parisian Jesuits who edited the monthly periodical the Journal de Trevoux, into a monolithic infamy devoted to eradicating truth and light from the world. The idea that Voltaire's criticism might inspire action in its readers implies the belief that humans can make the right choices; the satire is encouraging people . Like Voltaire, Maupertuis also shared a relationship with Emilie du Chtelet, one that included mathematical collaborations that far exceeded Voltaires capacities. Translations of Voltaires major plays are found in: Vol. Yet once it was thrust upon him, he adopted the identity of the philosophical exile and outlaw writer with conviction, using it to create a new identity for himself, one that was to have far reaching consequences for the history of Western philosophy. The chateau served as a reunion point for a wide range of intellectuals, and many believe that Voltaire was first introduced to natural philosophy generally, and to the work of Locke and the English Newtonians specifically, at Bolingbrokes estate. Voltaire saw in the controversy a new call to action, and he joined forces with the project soon after its appearance, penning numerous articles that began to appear with volume 5 in 1755. Voltaire did bring out one explicitly philosophical book in support this campaign, his Dictionnaire philosophique of 17641770. In these cases, Voltaires skepticism was harnessed to his libertarian convictions through his continual effort to use critical reason as a solvent for these superstitions and the authority they anchored. Bolingbroke lived in exile in France during the Regency period, and Voltaire was a frequent visitor to La Source, the Englishmans estate near Orlans. 1: The Huron (1771), The History of Jenni (1774), The One-eyed Street Porter, Cosi-sancta (1715), An Incident of Memory (1773), The Travels of Reason (1774), The Man with Forty Crowns (1768), Timon (1755), The King of Boutan (1761), and The City of Cashmere (1760). These horrors do not serve any apparent greater good, but point only to the cruelty and folly of humanity and the indifference of the natural world. [Available online at. The battles with Leibnizianism in the 1740s were the great theater for Voltaires work in this regard. Montesquieu: Bio, Life and Political Ideas Given his other activities, it is also likely that Voltaire frequented the coffeehouses of London even if no firm evidence survives confirming that he did. During Voltaires lifetime, this new acceptance translated into a final return to Paris in early 1778. During this period, Voltaire also adopted what would become his most famous and influential intellectual stance, announcing himself as a member of the party of humanity and devoting himself toward waging war against the twin hydras of fanaticism and superstition. This included the Whig circles that Bolingbrokes group opposed. The occasion for his departure was an affair of honor. Lowell Bair (ed. One climax in this effort was reached in 1774 when the Encyclopdiste and friend of Voltaire and the philosophes, Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot, was named Controller-General of France, the most powerful ministerial position in the kingdom, by the newly crowned King Louis XVI. They further mocked those who insisted on dreaming up chimeras like the celestial vortices as explanations for phenomena when no empirical evidence existed to support of such theories. Voltaire adopted a stance in this text somewhere between the strict determinism of rationalist materialists and the transcendent spiritualism and voluntarism of contemporary Christian natural theologians. This approach lead to the vortical account of celestial mechanics, a view that held material bodies to be swimming in an ethereal sea whose action pushed and pulled objects in the manner we observe. This placed him in opposition to Du Chtelet, even if this intellectual rift in no way soured their relationship. Voltaire was famous for being a writer, historian, and a philosopher known for his wittiness, his attacks on the Catholic Church, and his support of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and separation of church and state. Yet when asked to explain how bodies were able to act in the way that he mathematically and empirically demonstrated that they did, Newton famously replied I feign no hypotheses. From the perspective of traditional natural philosophy, this was tantamount to hand waving since offering rigorous causal accounts of the nature of bodies in motion was the very essence of this branch of the sciences. Voltaire also came to know the other Newtonians in Clarkes circle, and since he became proficient enough with English to write letters and even fiction in the language, it is very likely that he immersed himself in their writings as well. French philosopher Voltaire believed that if humans replaced their superstition and ignorance with rational thought and knowledge, the world would be a better place. Together these constitute the authoritative corpus of Voltaires written work. The mirror is a worthless invention. He offered mathematical analysis anchored in inescapable empirical fact as the new foundation for a rigorous account of the cosmos. She studied Greek and Latin and trained in mathematics, and when Voltaire reconnected with her in 1733 she was a very knowledgeable thinker in her own right even if her own intellectual career, which would include an original treatise in natural philosophy and a complete French translation of Newtons Principia Mathematicastill the only complete French translation ever publishedhad not yet begun. Franois-Marie Arouet, known by his literary pseudonym Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state. Voltaires own critical discourse against imaginative philosophical romances originated, in fact, with English and Dutch Newtonians, many of whom were expatriate French Huguenots, who developed these tropes as rhetorical weapons in their battles with Leibniz and European Cartesians who challenged the innovations of Newtonian natural philosophy. His literary debut occurred in 1718 with the publication of his Oedipe, a reworking of the ancient tragedy that evoked the French classicism of Racine and Corneille. Despite his belief that a perfect world did not exist, he did create a utopia in one of his most well-known pieces of prose, Candide. In Candide, he critiqued the philosophy of metaphysical optimism. Yet contained in the text is a serious attack on Leibnizian philosophy, one that in many ways marks the culmination of Voltaires decades long attack on this philosophy started during the Newton wars. Read More Example Of Satire In Candide But he was also a different kind of writer and thinker. Voltaires skepticism descended directly from the neo-Pyrrhonian revival of the Renaissance, and owes a debt in particular to Montaigne, whose essays wedded the stance of doubt with the positive construction of a self grounded in philosophical skepticism. For Voltaire, the events that sent him fleeing to Cirey were also the impetus for much of his work while there. ), Boston: Bedford/St. The play was first performed at the home of the Duchesse du Maine at Sceaux, a sign of Voltaires quick ascent to the very pinnacle of elite literary society. In its place, however, a new mechanical causality was introduced that attempted to explain the world in equally comprehensive terms through the mechanisms of an inert matter acting by direct contact and action alone. He believed people had the right to question everything to find truth. Yet even if Voltaire was introduced to English philosophy in this way, its influence on his thought was most shaped by his brief exile in England between 172629. Voltaire never actually said I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. Yet the myth that associates this dictum with his name remains very powerful, and one still hears his legacy invoked through the redeclaration of this pronouncement that he never actually declared.
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