Catholic monks and nuns - European religion Christians, Jews, and Muslims In 1500 AD, most people in Europe were Christians. A fair number of Europeans were Jewish, and some were Muslims, especially in Eastern [...]
René Descartes - Enlightenment philosopher How do we know what is true? All this fighting about religion and new ideas coming from Africa and the Americas, China and India meant that [...]
Mary Wollstonecraft - European philosophy Who was Mary Wollstonecraft? Mary Wollstonecraft was the most famous woman among the Enlightenment philosophers of the 1700s AD. Damaris Masham Mary Astell Enlightenment philosophy All our [...]
Voltaire - a French philosopher Voltaire took ideas about religion, science, and human rights that were just getting started in the 1700s AD, and encouraged new ways of thinking about [...]
Jean-Paul Sartre - a French philosopher After World War I, many people in Europe felt that the old world had ended and a new world was beginning. Jean-Paul Sartre grew [...]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a European philosopher Rousseau was born in 1712 AD into a Protestant family living in Geneva, and his mother died of an infection she caught while he was being born. Like the [...]
Damaris Masham's house, Oates, in England Why did Masham become a philosopher? Damaris Masham's dad was a philosopher, and when she grew up her boyfriend, John Locke, was also a philosopher. [...]
Karl Marx, a European philosopher and economist How did Hegel inspire Marx? The famous German philosopher Hegel died when Karl Marx was 13 years old. Marx must have heard a lot about [...]
Niccolo Machiavelli When did Machiavelli live? Around 1500 AD, Machiavelli was working for the government in the city-state of Florence. Florence was smack in the middle of the Renaissance, which meant that everybody [...]
John Locke Who was John Locke? John Locke was an English philosopher in the late 1600s AD. He was just starting his career at the height of the Enlightenment, when Hobbes was an old [...]
