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rincipally on Italy but later spreading to Holland, Germany, and – to a lesser extent – the British Isles. Other intellectual and artistic giants of the Renaissance included Petrarch, Dante, Boccaccio and Machiavelli. It was a period of an extraordinary explosion in the growth of the arts, especially painting and sculpture but also music and poetry. Of particular significance was the ‘back to the books themselves’ movement – the rediscovery of the great writings of the Hellenic Period and of Rome; but now reading them directly rather than through the filter of sanctioned Church commentaries. The Reformation freed the new denominations of the intellectual constraints which (they argued) had been imposed by the Roman Catholic Church on creative intellectual inquiry; an issue largely addressed by the Catholic Church in the Counter Reformation. The Renaissance is regarded by many as setting the stage for ‘the modern era’.

(4)  The Modern Era: The “modern era” is generally considered to be the period from the late 17th century to the beginning of the Great War (later called World War I), with the period after that commonly referred to simply as “recent” – in historical terms. It begins with the Age of Science, and also coincides with the Age of Enlightenment (also called the Age of Reason). It is a period of spectacular growth in the natural sciences; a period of optimism marked by the triumph of reason over faith, tradition, and superstition, and a new respect for experience as recorded via systematic observations – an approach inspired philosophically by the British Empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, and Hume). “Systematic” became a key concept in all disciplines concerned with recording, explaining, and linking discoveries in an orderly way, grounded in a Cartesian-like foundationalism, augmented in the late nineteenth century by the birth of post-Aristotelian logic with the inventions of the propositional and predicate calculi, and set theory (“Boolean algebra”) – the intellectual platform that made the birth of computing science possible. It was a period in which the developed economies transformed themselves from post-feudal village-anchored agrarianism to urban industrialisation and with it a rapid rise in the standard of living and life expectancy, the growth of artificial canals and railways, and the shift from sail to steam power for ocean-going vessels. Mass education was embraced as an industrial necessity. Social institutions were secularised, the political left was born, and the driving spirit was one of inevitable progress.

But within this period there was also a reaction, and that reaction was a movement known as Romanticism. This movement began in the late 18th century as a reaction against the very strengths of the Enlightenment: the authority of reason, the strength of system and order (whether scientific or social), classicism and scholarship, and the desirability of industrial and social progress. It had an almost pantheistic attitude to the environment, and glorified the primitive, and man’s unfiltered relationship with nature. Its principal philosophical representative was the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778), whose principal theme was that natural (or primitive) man is ‘perfect’ but is contaminated by corrupt society. Rousseau was not referring to financial or legal corruption but essentially anything that required people to behave other than in the ways they spontaneously wished 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。