Enlightenment Rhetorics

Enlightenment Rhetoric:The Age of Reason

Giambattista Vico On the Study Methods of Our Time

&John Locke Human Understanding

Enlightenment Thinking

• Reject superstition• Sought truth through use of reason• Viewed world from secular, human centered perspective• Embraced humanism• Limitlessness in knowledge – revolutions in science and

philosophy• Empiricism• Experimental method• A belief in human perfectibility through education and

unlimited progress

Detailed Explanation of the System of Human Knowledge, 1751

Diderot’s Encyclopedie

Phase 1: Rococo Style

Jean-Antoine Watteau, Departure from Cythera, 1717

Jean-Honore Fragonard, The Lover Crowned, 1771-1773

Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii, 1784

Phase 2: Neoclassicism

David, The Death of Socrates, 1787

Casper David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818

Phase 3: Romanticism