La Prusia del siglo XVII: la acepción de la Ilustración

Abstract

By reviewing the historiography of the eighteenth century in Prussia, this writing will shiw the different conceptions and proposals about the ways of proceeding in the use of reason, in the territories which form part of the actual Germany. Thus, based on the writings of philosophers immersed in the process of European Enlightenment, is intended to expose a brief fragment of Germanic philosophy, developed in the last decades of the eighteenth century of our era.

Similarly, this essay will show the context and some of the characteristic features of the eighteenth century as the Social Contract and the Encyclopedia. Also, some positions will be indicated to define the Enlightenment as the most important process in Europe during the eighteenth century, taking as its main support the philosophical movement developed in the kingdom of Prussia. In addition to this, some of the conceptions that have been expressed around the Enlightenment, during the present century and the previous century, will be presented, exposing in general form some inferences developed on this subject.

In this sense, among the topics that will be revealed in this article are: the degrees of participation of the Enlightenment in the population, advocated by Moses Meldessohn in his article On the Question: What does to Enlighten mean?; the public and private use of reason in the individual, pointed out by Immanuel Kant and, the signs to recognize peoples under the reign of the Enlightenment, proposed by Christoph Martin Wieland, which appears in his text Six questions about the Enlightenment.