the Enlightenment

noun

: a movement of the 18th century that stressed the belief that science and logic give people more knowledge and understanding than tradition and religion

Examples of the Enlightenment in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

It was established by eighteenth-century polymaths as an expression of the Enlightenment conviction that universal truths might be arrived at through intellectual inquiry and scientific reason. —Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, 6 May 2024

Four exhibits on Kant and the Enlightenment will open in Bonn, Lüneburg, Potsdam and Berlin. —Susan Neiman, New York Times, 17 Apr. 2024

But most shared one common feature: a rejection of the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment. —Ervand Abrahamian, Foreign Affairs, 18 Apr. 2016

The historical novels that make up most of his oeuvre favor the Enlightenment and its ideas, but there are also currents of mid-twentieth-century surrealism and existentialism, Afro-Caribbean legend, Hollywoodesque epic, and Victorian maximalism. —Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books, 1 Feb. 2024

Whereas Eliot knows enough about the Enlightenment’s major and minor figures, for instance, to deftly parody the bumbling uncle who has read them but shallowly. —Daniel Foster, National Review, 30 Nov. 2023

That shift was conceived and realized with the Enlightenment and then the Industrial Revolution. —Martin Wolf, Foreign Affairs, 1 July 2015

From the Enlightenment to the French Revolution, the ideas swirling through Europe were absorbed and transmuted by Mozart into peerless music. —Terry W. Hartle, The Christian Science Monitor, 22 June 2023

But the author contends that Mozart’s music may have been even more powerfully influenced by the rapid social and political developments – most notably the French Revolution and the Enlightenment – that were fundamentally altering the contours of European civilization. —Terry W. Hartle, The Christian Science Monitor, 22 June 2023