Who is your favorite enlightenment era writer?

Are you goint to answer or are you underaged? Which one?

Alex de Tocqueville (I bet I wrote that incorrectly)

He's also not an Enlightenment figure.

Voltaire lived in a time period where most European states were basically Saudi Arabia.
He was a secularist, of course is not gonna have much love for a regime that pretends to be the roman empire

I figured perhaps he isn't. But why not?

Ada Palmer

Voltaire was popular in his time but his intellectual pursuits have not really persisted through the ages. Candide is funny but it's not really a viable criticism of Leibniz's work. And Voltaire making fun of Leibniz turned out to be a really bad idea because relativist physics turned out to be correct anyway.

Joseph de Maistre

same
fag

to answer your question OP, it's Leibniz :^)

Reading enlightenment writers today is just slightly more sophisticated and less worth the effort than reading Facebook quotes.
>dude the world would be so much better were it not for stupid people
>just use your reason and everything will be ok
>man is good by nature but those meanies that take the power make him a meanie too

Just read Notes from the Underground if you still don't believe this kind of philosophy is a waste of time. I honestly think there are many ancient writers who are more relevant to us today than Voltaire or Rousseau.

Voltaire was buddy buddy with powerful people like Frederick or Katharine the Great.
He had much more opportunity to spread the ideas of enlightenment to political elites, compared to somebody like Leibniz

Leibniz was actually an influential lawyer and diplomat who did ecumenical work with the church. Anyway, I don't even disagree with you, Voltaire was, as I said, influential in his time. But he has virtually no staying power in intellectual history.

I would view Voltaire as a political activist rather than a hardcore philosoph.
It is true that he might not have had revolutionary philosophical ideas, but he was incredibly gifted when it came to writing, and he used that talent to spread the ideas of enlightenment.
Also, he made great contribution as a historian

Okay, sure. But taking what you said into account, do you see why it makes sense to giggle when someone says Voltaire is their favourite philosopher?

It really depends on how much you value new philosophical ideas vs spreading those ideas to the elites and the general population

Another example would be Darwin vs Huxley.
While Darwin discovered one of the most important scientific theories, Huxley helped to spread the theory of evolution and to establish scientists as a profession. It is really hard to say who contributed more to science.

The Enlightenment ended with the French Revolution and the Romanticist reaction it engendered. De Tocqueville lived in the 19th century.

Okay. I guess I kind of agree with you, it's hard to attribute credit when there is a division between the discovery/discoverer and whoever is responsible for propagating it.

In the specific context of my first comment though I still think anyone who says Voltaire is their favourite philosopher is being silly- but I guess if they said Voltaire was their favourite enlightenment thinker there would be no issue.

Easily Diderot.

It's a Veeky Forums meme

This or Laurence Sterne

I think in voltaires days, the term "philosopher" was much broader than today. Basically, every rational thinker was considered a philosopher.
Frederick II. considered himself a philosopher-king, and what we call now scientists were natural philosophers.
So it really depends if you use the modern day or the enlightenment era term

ok

Brutal.

and of course Joseph de Maistre

>Voltaire was their favourite enlightenment thinker
Honestly, Voltaire took the worst aspects of enlightenment.

Kant? anybody?

That's fair.

>teleports behind you

wasn't he pre-enlightenment?
really love his work though

Any of the early writers of the Counter-Enlightenment. FUCK the Enlightenment. The graves of everyone who had a hand in that catastrophe should be dug up and turned into outhouses. The Enlightenment was the single greatest misstep in human history.

In European history, anyway. But I guess that's almost the same thing.

Rousseau for seeing through the private property scheme

Great argument

Rousseau was a fag who thought we would be better off as cavemen.
Voltaire was right about him

You do have to admire the fact that, without actually saying anything, he's still successfully trolling christcucks three centuries later

Well he is currently burning in hell so the Body of Christ won in the end, as it always does.

>Pope Francis says atheists can do good and go to heaven too!
catholic.org/news/hf/faith/story.php?id=51077

Sorry sweety, looks like the pope disagrees with you

This is obviously a mistranslation, that there is no way to Christ except through the Church is an unchangeable dogma of the Church, if Francis denied it then the very action would excommunicate him instantly and invalidate his papacy.

I am sorry, but who holds the Keys of the kingdom, you or the Bishop of Rome?

That's what I'm saying, if Francis denied that dogma then it would mean he wasn't the true Bishop of Rome.

>Rousseau was a fag who thought we would be better off as cavemen.

Oversimplification.

>Hey, I know you're my enemy, but there's a stag over there and I know we're both hungry, so maybe you could shut the fuck up for a second and we could go get lunch.

Thought we'd be better off how, again?

>REEEE HE IS BURNING IN HELL

Are you literally twelve? I can't believe you chriscucks still use as a genuine insult.

Christianity is not a democracy.
The pope is infallible when it comes to Christian dogma. Whatever he says is the absolute truth

You obviously don't understand the concept of speaking ex cathedra.

so please do tell, what exactly did Rousseau contribute?

>Rousseau was a fag who thought we would be better off as cavemen.

retard. this is literally the easiest way to spot a reddit pseud. "m-muh noble savage and rousseau."

there is no noble savage in rousseau and rousseau is so damn edgy and prescient that liberals have to shill this garbage interpretation on to rousseau in order to disarm him

these guys get it

he was literally saying that we were better off as savages

>he's still successfully trolling christcucks three centuries later

uhh, you read what he said about jews? voltaire is always quoted as the free speech guy but what he said would be considered today hate speech

baka

not at all

rousseau isn't even hard to read nor is he excessively long

it's like reddit reads the first sentence and then covers their ears to everything else in the text and all other texts of rousseau

there is no noble savage in rousseau

youtube.com/watch?v=56HSPQHSqEE

can't blitz the niz

and yet neither you nor anybody else in this thread manages to describe what rousseau was about

Because he's the archetype pseudo-intellectual.

This.
Berkeley and Malebranche were decent too.

GREAT OBSERVATION

youtube.com/watch?v=ST86JM1RPl0

funny how nobody can defend Rousseaus bullshit

You want decontextualised fragments to attack with boring insults, then give your defender the benefit of your own assessment of Rousseau's bullshit.

I'm never here to come to truth, just to practice and play.

Like you memelords are all that interested

he BTFO the hre but thats about it lad