w. 39

Monday, Sept. 26

Here's the schedule I showed at the beginning of class:

Once you start the paper assignment, I will be able to help you determine which issues to focus on as well as how to tie your topic together with the material that I've been presenting in class.

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ENGLISH
OK = okay (not okey)

You can use okey in English, but usually only to write okey-dokey.

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I have loaded up on Vklass the slides from today's lesson.

I started the lesson by talking about different developments that can be connected with the printing press:

-       criticism of the Roman Catholic Church in the 16^th century, which then leads to the Protestant Reformation and the formation of new Churches in Europe.

-       the Scientific Revolution

-       the rise in literacy in Europe, particularly in countries that become Protestant.

I then explained that there is a key connection between the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. During the Sci. Rev.,  in the 16th and 17th centuries, scholars use rational thinking to try and understand the natural world. In the late 17th century and the 18th century -- primarily in England and France, this same rational thinking is used to try and answer questions and solve problems about society -- specifically, governments and human rights.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Social constructs, such as human rights, are not the same thing as natural phenomena. All groups of humans experience natural phenomena and come up with different explanations (for why there are different seasons, why sometimes it rains and sometimes it doesn’t, why volcanoes erupt, why the stars in the heavens move, why the sun appears to move, why some metal are magnetic, how the heart pumps blood,  etc.)

But the idea of rights is not something that all groups of people experience or have a common view about. The concept of rights is a construct. We may argue that we believe in a certain set of rights, but they are not a natural phenomena.

However, in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, intellectuals began to argue that there are natural rights that humans should enjoy (have) just because they are humans — not because they belong to a particular class (e.g., nobility /adel), because they have a certain amount of money, because they belong to a particular profession, or because they are a member of a particular club.

When these ideas are introduced, they are new. And when they become part of the founding documents of the American and French Revolutions, they are, well, revolutionary.

I'll add more later