A review by marystevens
An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? by Immanuel Kant

5.0

The thesis of this essay is in the first paragraph: dare to know. He thinks custom and cowardice keeps us from thinking for ourselves. Writing under a stable Monarchy but in the period between the American and French Revolutions, Kant is sure that change will come gradually! :). His idea is that Enlightenment Man will use his reason in one of two ways: private reason where a priest decides to preach within the canons of his church and public reason where he might publish a tract questioning articles of belief. Kant, btw, is the one who bridged the Rationality of Descartes and the Empiricism of Locke and Hume by positing that we know and experience the phenomenal world while we have faith in the noumenal world.