| Summary: | 碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 歷史研究所 === 100 === The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement of the eighteenth century. It advocated ideas of social reform, and was the successor to a series of movement in the history of western civilization including the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. The Enlightenment is generally recognized as the beginning of the modern era in the West; and Rationalism is identified as an important indicator of modernity. Since the twentieth century, the connection between the Enlightenment and modernization had been widely examined and discussed. However, under the influence of the social sciences, historical discussions on this subject often overestimated the importance of theory and thereby were liable to oversimplification.
This thesis, by investigating how contemporary scholars and main trends of thoughts in modern history treated the Enlightenment and its ideas, presents the relationship between the spirit of the Enlightenment and modernity, and interprets the position of the Enlightenment in history and the nature of modernity. The conclusions reached here are: (1) The Enlightenment’s promotion of social reforms and popular education was due to the idea of rationalism; it should be viewed as part of the process, instead of a key factor, of modernization in the West. (2) Rationalism was challenged at the very beginning of its existence, continually questioned by various scholars in the past centuries, and severely tested by post-modernism; however, it still holds its eminent status in epistemology. History showed that although rationalism has its inner weakness and cannot be put into practice thoroughly, its self-examining function prevents it from being discarded.
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