Renaissance enlightment

From Geography

In the Renaissance there was a broad shift in intellectual, artistic and practical actions. Together with this shift the movement of the Enlightenment came up. This movement existed of thinkers and writers who would believe they were more enlightenment then other civilians in their society saw it as their task to enlighten them aswell (Brians, 1998).

This came together in the Renaissance enlightment, the writers and thinkers believed that they could build a better society by fighting the domination of institutional powers who determined and enforced the moral distiction between right & wrong and good & bad (Ernste, lecture, 07-09-2012). They believe that human reason would be able to fight suppression of the dominant powers. According to them the main dominant powers were religion and the small group of people who ruled society. These two dominant powers are embodied respectively in the Catholic Church and the hereditary aristocracy (Brians, 1998).

This development finally led to the development of Humanism, in this approach the human being has an active role in encountering and creating the external world (Cloke, Philo & Sadler, 1991), instead of strong institutional powers as the Catholic Church or the hereditary aristocracy who enforce desirable behaviour.

References

Brians, P. (1998). The Enlightenment find date october 23rd of 2012, via http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/hum_303/enlightenment.html

Cloke, P., Philo, Ch. & Sadler, D. (1991) Approaching Human Geography. Chapman, London.

Ernste, H. (2012). Personal communication, Spatial Action: Classical Action Theories. September 7th 2012.

Contributers

Published by Marjolein Kouwenhoven october 23rd 2012