The Age of Enlightenment (or simply the Enlightenment or Age of Reason) was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in Church and state. Originating about 1650–1700, it was sparked by philosophers Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), John Locke (1632–1704), and Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) and by mathematician Isaac Newton (1643–1727). Ruling princes often endorsed and fostered Enlightenment figures and even attempted to apply their ideas of government. The Enlightenment flourished until about 1790–1800, after which the emphasis on reason gave way to Romanticism's emphasis on emotion and a Counter-Enlightenment gained force.

The center of the Enlightenment was France, where it was based in the salons and culminated in the great ''Encyclopédie'' (1751–72) edited by Denis Diderot (1713–1784) with contributions by hundreds of leading philosophes (intellectuals) such as Voltaire (1694–1778) and Montesquieu (1689–1755). Some 25,000 copies of the 35 volume set were sold, half of them outside France. The new intellectual forces spread to urban centers across Europe, notably England, Scotland, the German states, the Netherlands, Russia, Italy, Austria, and Spain, then jumped the Atlantic into the European colonies, where it influenced Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, among many others, and played a major role in the American Revolution. The political ideals influenced the American Declaration of Independence, the United States Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and the Polish–Lithuanian Constitution of May 3, 1791.

Use of the term

The term "Enlightenment" came into use in English during the mid-18th century, with particular reference to French philosophy, as the equivalent of a term then in use by German writers, ''Zeitalter der Aufklärung'', signifying officially the philosophical outlook of the 18th century. However, the German term ''Aufklärung'' was not merely applied retrospectively; it was already the common term by 1784, when Immanuel Kant published his influential essay ''Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?''

According to Kant,The Enlightenment was "Mankind's final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error." According to historian Roy Porter, the thesis of the liberation of the human mind from the dogmatic state of ignorance that he argues was prevalent at the time is the epitome of what the age of enlightenment was trying to capture. According to Bertrand Russell, however, the enlightenment was a phase in a progressive development, which began in antiquity, and that reason and challenges to the established order were constant ideals throughout that time. Russell argues that the enlightenment was ultimately born out of the Protestant reaction against the Catholic counter-reformation, when the philosophical views of the past two centuries crystallized into a coherent world view. He argues that many of the philosophical views, such as affinity for democracy against monarchy, originated among Protestants in the early 16th century to justify their desire to break away from the pope and the Catholic Church. Though many of these philosophical ideals were picked up by Catholics, Russell argues, by the 18th century the Enlightenment was the principal manifestation of the schism that began with Martin Luther.

Chartier (1991) argues that the Enlightenment was only invented after the fact for a political goal. He claims the leaders of the French Revolution created an Enlightenment canon of basic text, by selecting certain authors and identifying them with The Enlightenment in order to legitimize their republican political agenda.

Historian Jonathan Israel dismisses the post-modern interpretation of the Enlightenment and the attempts of modern historians to link social and economical reasons for the revolutionary aspect of the period. He instead focuses on the history of ideas in the period from 1650 to the end of the 18th century, and claims that it was the ideas themselves that caused the change that eventually led to the revolutions of the later half of the 18th century and the early 19th century. Israel argues that until the 1650s Western civilization "was based on a largely shared core of faith, tradition and authority". Up until this date most intellectual debates revolved around "confessional" - that is Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed (Calvinist), or Anglican issues", and the main aim of these debates was to establish which bloc of faith ought to have the "monopoly of truth and a God-given title to authority". After this date everything thus previously rooted in tradition was questioned and often replaced by new concepts in the light of philosophical reason. After the second half of the 17th century and during the 18th century a "general process of rationalization and secularization set in which rapidly overthrew theology's age-old hegemony in the world of study", and that confessional disputes was reduced to a secondary status in favor of the "escalating contest between faith and incredulity". Firstly the ''radical enlightenment'', largely inspired by the one-substance philosophy of Spinoza, which in its political form adhered to: "democracy; racial and sexual equality; individual liberty of lifestyle; full freedom of thought, expression, and the press; eradication of religious authority from the legislative process and education; and full separation of church and state". Secondly the ''moderate enlightenment'', which in a number of different philosophical systems, like those in writings of Descartes, John Locke, Isaac Newton or Christian Wolff, expressed some support for critical review and renewal of the old modes of thought, but in other parts sought reform and accommodation with the old systems of power and faith. These two lines of thought were again met by the conservative counter enlightenment, encompassing the thinkers which held unto the traditional belief based systems of thought.

Timespan

There is little consensus on the precise start of the age of Enlightenment; the beginning of the 18th century (1700) or the middle of the 17th century (1650) are often used as an approximate starting point. If taken back to the mid-17th century, the Enlightenment would trace its origins to Descartes' ''Discourse on Method'', published in 1637. Others define the Enlightenment as beginning in Britain's Glorious Revolution of 1688 or with the publication of Isaac Newton's ''Principia Mathematica'' in 1687. Jonathan Israel argues, "after 1650, everything, no matter how fundamental or deeply rooted, was questioned in the light of philosophic reason" and has made a detailed case that from 1650–1750 Spinoza was "the chief challenger of the fundamentals of revealed religion, received ideas, tradition, morality, and what was everywhere regarded, in absolutist and non-absolutist states alike, as divinely constituted political authority."

As to its end, most scholars use the last years of the century—often choosing the French Revolution of 1789 or the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars (1804–15) as a convenient point in time with which to date the end of the Enlightenment.

National variations

The Enlightenment operated in most countries, but often with a specific local emphasis. For example in France it became associated with anti-government and anti-Church radicalism, while in Germany it reached deep into the middle classes and expressed a spiritualistic and nationalistic tone without threatening governments or established churches. Government responses varied widely. In France the government was hostile, and the philosophes fought against its censorship. They were sometimes imprisoned or hounded into exile. The British government generally ignored the Enlightenment's leaders in England and Scotland, although it did give Isaac Newton a knighthood and a very lucrative government office in charge of the mint.

Enlightened absolutism

In several nations powerful rulers—called "enlightened despots" by historians—welcomed leaders of the Enlightenment at court and had them help design laws and programs to reform the system, typically to build stronger national states. The most prominent exemplars were Frederick the Great of Prussia, Empress Catherine the Great, who ruled Russia 1762–1796, and Emperor Joseph II, ruler of Austria 1780–1790. Joseph was over-enthusiastic, announcing so many reforms that had so little support that revolts broke out and his regime became a comedy of errors and nearly all his programs were reversed. Senior ministers Pombal in Portugal and Struensee in Denmark governed according to Enlightenment ideals.

Germany

Before 1750 the German upper classes looked to France for intellectual, cultural and architectural leadership; French was the language of high society. By the mid-18th century the German Enlightenment in music, philosophy, science and literature emerged as an intellectual force independent of France. Frederick the Great (1712–86), the king of Prussia 1740–1786, saw himself as a leader of the Enlightenment and patronized philosophers and scientists at his court in Berlin. He was an enthusiast for French ideas as he ridiculed German culture and was unaware of the remarkable advances it was undergoing. Voltaire, who had been imprisoned and maltreated by the French government, was eager to accept Frederick's invitation to live at his palace. Frederick explained, "My principal occupation is to combat ignorance and prejudice ... to enlighten minds, cultivate morality, and to make people as happy as it suits human nature, and as the means at my disposal permit. Other rulers were supportive, such as Karl Friedrich, Grand Duke of Baden, who ruled Baden for 73 years (1738–1811).

Christian Wolff (1679–1754) was the pioneer as a writer who expounded the Enlightenment to German readers; he legitimized German as a philosophic language.

thumb|400px|''Weimar's Courtyard of the Muses'' demonstrates the importance of Weimar. Schiller is reading; on the far left (seated) Wieland and Herder, Goethe standing on the right in front of the pillar. 1860 painting by Theobald von OerJohann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) broke new ground in philosophy and poetry, specifically in the Sturm und Drang movement of proto-Romanticism. Weimar Classicism ("Weimarer Klassik") was a cultural and literary movement based in Weimar that sought to establish a new humanism by synthesizing Romantic, classical and Enlightenment ideas. The movement, from 1772 until 1805, involved Herder as well as polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), a poet and historian. Herder argued that every folk had its own particular identity, which was expressed in its language and culture. This legitimized the promotion of German language and culture and helped shape the development of German nationalism. Schiller's plays expressed the restless spirit of his generation, depicting the hero's struggle against social pressures and the force of destiny.

German music, sponsored by the upper classes, came of age under composers Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791).

In remote Königsberg philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) tried to reconcile rationalism and religious belief, individual freedom and political authority. Kant's work contained basic tensions that would continue to shape German thought—and indeed all of European philosophy—well into the 20th century.

The German Enlightenment won the support of princes, aristocrats and the middle classes and permanently reshaped the culture.

Scotland

The 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment, embodied by such world-class influential thinkers as Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and David Hume, paved the way for the modernization of Scotland and the entire Atlantic world. Hutcheson, the father of the Scottish Enlightenment, championed political liberty and the right of popular rebellion against tyranny. Smith, in his monumental ''Wealth of Nations'' (1776), advocated liberty in the sphere of commerce and the global economy. Hume developed philosophical concepts that directly influenced James Madison and thus the U.S. Constitution. In 19th-century Britain, the Scottish Enlightenment, as popularized by Dugald Stewart, became the basis of classical liberalism.

Scientific progress was led by James Hutton and William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin. James Watt (instrument maker to the University of Glasgow), who perfected the crucial technology of the Industrial Revolution: the steam engine.

Russia

In Russia Enlightenment of the mid-eighteenth century saw the government begin to actively encourage the proliferation of arts and sciences. This era produced the first Russian university, library, theatre, public museum, and independent press. Like other enlightened despots, Catherine the Great played a key role in fostering the arts, sciences, and education. She used her own interpretation of Enlightenment ideals, assisted by notable international experts such as Voltaire (by correspondence) and, in residence, world class scientists such as Leonhard Euler, Peter Simon Pallas and Anders Johan Lexell. The national Enlightenment differed from its Western European counterpart in that it promoted further Modernization of all aspects of Russian life and was concerned with attacking the institution of serfdom in Russia. Historians argue that the Russian enlightenment centered on the individual instead of societal enlightenment and encouraged the living of an enlightened life.

Spain

Charles III, king of Spain from 1759 to 1788, tried to rescue his empire from decay through far-reaching reforms such as weakening the Church and its monasteries, promoting science and university research, facilitating trade and commerce, modernizing agriculture, and avoiding wars. He was unable to control budget deficits, and borrowed more and more. Spain relapsed after his death.

Poland

The Age of Enlightenment reached Poland later than in Germany or Austria, as szlachta (nobility) culture (Sarmatism) together with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth political system (Golden Freedoms) were in deep crisis. The period of Polish Enlightenment began in the 1730s–40s, peaked in the reign of Poland's last king, Stanisław August Poniatowski (second half of the 18th century), went into decline with the Third Partition of Poland (1795), and ended in 1822, replaced by Romanticism in Poland. The model constitution of 1791 expressed Enlightenment ideals but was in effect for only one year as the nation was partitioned among its neighbors. More enduring were the cultural achievements, which created a nationalist spirit in Poland.

Goals

No brief summary can do justice to the diversity of enlightened thought in 18th-century Europe. Because it was a value system rather than a set of shared beliefs, there are many contradictory trains to follow. As Outram notes, The Enlightenment comprised "many different paths, varying in time and geography, to the common goals of progress, of tolerance, and the removal of abuses in Church and state."

In his famous essay "What is Enlightenment?" (1784), Immanuel Kant described it simply as freedom to use one's own intelligence. More broadly, the Enlightenment period is marked by increasing empiricism, scientific rigor, and reductionism, along with increasing questioning of religious orthodoxy.

Historian Peter Gay asserts the Enlightenment broke through "the sacred circle," whose dogma had circumscribed thinking. The Sacred Circle is a term used by Peter Gay to describe the interdependent relationship between the hereditary aristocracy, the leaders of the church and the text of the Bible. This interrelationship manifests itself as kings invoking the doctrine "Divine Right of Kings" to rule. Thus church sanctioned the rule of the king and the king defended the church in return.

Zafirovski, (2010) argues that The Enlightenment is the source of critical ideas, such as the centrality of freedom, democracy, and reason as primary values of society—as opposed to the divine right of kings or traditions as the ruling authority. This view argues that the establishment of a contractual basis of rights would lead to the market mechanism and capitalism, the scientific method, religious tolerance, and the organization of states into self-governing republics through democratic means. In this view, the tendency of the ''philosophes'' in particular to apply rationality to every problem is considered the essential change. Later critics of The Enlightenment, such as the Romantics of the 19th century, contended that its goals for rationality in human affairs were too ambitious to ever be achieved.

A variety of 19th-century movements, including liberalism and neo-classicism, traced their intellectual heritage back to the Enlightenment.

Social and cultural interpretation

In opposition to the intellectual historiographical approach of the Enlightenment, which examines the various currents, or discourses of intellectual thought within the European context during the 17th and 18th centuries, the cultural (or social) approach examines the changes that occurred in European society and culture. Under this approach, the Enlightenment is less a collection of thought than a process of changing sociabilities and cultural practices – both the "content" and the processes by which this content was spread are now important. Roger Chartier describes it as follows:

One of the primary elements of the cultural interpretation of the Enlightenment is the rise of the public sphere in Europe. Jürgen Habermas has influenced thinking on the public sphere more than any other, though his model is increasingly called into question. The essential problem that Habermas attempted to answer concerned the conditions necessary for "rational, critical, and genuinely open discussion of public issues". Or, more simply, the social conditions required for Enlightenment ideas to be spread and discussed. His response was the formation in the late 17th century and 18th century of the "bourgeois public sphere", a "realm of communication marked by new arenas of debate, more open and accessible forms of urban public space and sociability, and an explosion of print culture". More specifically, Habermas highlights three essential elements of the public sphere: # it was egalitarian; # it discussed the domain of "common concern"; # argument was founded on reason.

James Van Horn Melton provides a good summary of the values of this bourgeois public sphere: its members held reason to be supreme; everything was open to criticism (the public sphere is critical); and its participants opposed secrecy of all sorts. This helps explain what Habermas meant by the domain of "common concern". Habermas uses the term to describe those areas of political/social knowledge and discussion that were previously the exclusive territory of the state and religious authorities, now open to critical examination by the public sphere.

Habermas credits the creation of the bourgeois public sphere to two long-term historical trends: the rise of the modern nation state and the rise of capitalism. The modern nation state in its consolidation of public power created by counterpoint a private realm of society independent of the state – allowing for the public sphere. Capitalism likewise increased society's autonomy and self-awareness, along with creating an increasing need for the exchange of information. As the nascent public sphere expanded, it embraced a large variety of institutions; the most commonly cited being coffee houses and cafés, salons and the literary public sphere, figuratively localized in the Republic of Letters.

Dorinda Outram provides further description of the rise of the public sphere. The context of the rise of the public sphere was the economic and social change commonly grouped under the effects of the Industrial Revolution: "economic expansion, increasing urbanisation, rising population and improving communications in comparison to the stagnation of the previous century". Rising efficiency in production techniques and communication lowered the prices of consumer goods at the same time as it increased the amount and variety of goods available to consumers (including the literature essential to the public sphere). Meanwhile, the colonial experience (most European states had colonial Empires in the 18th century) began to expose European society to extremely heterogeneous cultures. Outram writes that the end result was the breaking down of "barriers between cultural systems, religious divides, gender differences and geographical areas". In short, the social context was set for the public sphere to come into existence.

A reductionist view of the Habermasian model has been used as a springboard to showcase historical investigations into the development of the public sphere. There are many examples of noble and lower class participation in areas such as the coffeehouses and the freemasonic lodges, demonstrating that the bourgeois-era public sphere was enriched by cross-class influences. A rough depiction of the public sphere as independent and critical of the state is contradicted by the diverse cases of government-sponsored public institutions and government participation in debate, along with the cases of private individuals using public venues to promote the status quo.

How public was the public sphere?

The word "public" implies the highest level of inclusivity – the public sphere by definition should be open to all. However, as the analysis of many "public" institutions of the Enlightenment will show, this sphere was only public to relative degrees. Indeed, as Roger Chartier emphasizes, Enlightenment thinkers frequently contrasted their conception of the "public" with that of the people: Chartier cites Condorcet, who contrasted "opinion" with populace; Marmontel with "the opinion of men of letters" versus "the opinion of the multitude"; and d'Alembert, who contrasted the "truly enlightened public" with "the blind and noisy multitude". As Mona Ozouf underlines, public opinion was defined in opposition to the opinion of the greater population. While the nature of public opinion during the Enlightenment is as difficult to define as it is today, it is nonetheless clear that the body that held it (i.e. the public sphere) was exclusive rather than inclusive. This observation will become more apparent during the descriptions of the institutions of the public sphere, most of which excluded both women and the lower classes.

Dissemination of ideas

The philosophes spent a great deal of energy disseminating their ideas among educated men and women in cosmopolitan cities. They used many venues, some of them quite new.

Schools and universities

In Germany and Scotland, the Enlightenment leaders were based in universities. However, in general the universities and schools of France and most of Europe were bastions of traditionalism and were not hospitable to the Enlightenment. In France the major exception was the medical university at Montpellier.

Learned academies

The history of Academies in France during the Enlightenment begins with the Academy of Science, founded in 1666 in Paris. It was closely tied to the French state, acting as an extension of a government seriously lacking in scientists. It helped promote and organize new disciplines, and it trained new scientists. It also contributed to the enhancement of scientists’ social status, considered them to be the "most useful of all citizens". Academies demonstrate the rising interest in science along with its increasing secularization, as evidenced by the small number of clerics who were members (13 percent).

The presence of the French academies in the public sphere cannot be attributed to their membership; although the majority of their members were bourgeois, the exclusive institution was only open to elite Parisian scholars. They did perceive themselves to be "interpreters of the sciences for the people". Indeed, it was with this in mind that academians took it upon themselves to disprove the popular pseudo-science of mesmerism.

However, the strongest case for the French Academies being part of the public sphere comes the concours académiques (roughly translated as academic contests) they sponsored throughout France. As Jeremy L. Caradonna argues in a recent article in the ''Annales'', "Prendre part au siècle des Lumières: Le concours académique et la culture intellectuelle au XVIIIe siècle", these academic contests were perhaps the most public of any institution during the Enlightenment.

''L’Académie française'' revived a practice dating back to the Middle Ages when it revived public contests in the mid-17th century. The subject matter was generally religious and/or monarchical, and featured essays, poetry, and painting. By roughly 1725, however, this subject matter had radically expanded and diversified, including "royal propaganda, philosophical battles, and critical ruminations on the social and political institutions of the Old Regime." Controversial topics were not always avoided: Caradonna cites as examples the theories of Newton and Descartes, the slave trade, women's education, and justice in France.

More importantly, the contests were open to all, and the enforced anonymity of each submission guaranteed that neither gender nor social rank would determine the judging. Indeed, although the "vast majority" of participants belonged to the wealthier strata of society ("the liberal arts, the clergy, the judiciary, and the medical profession"), there were some cases of the popular classes submitting essays, and even winning.

Similarly, a significant number of women participated –and won – the competitions. Of a total of 2 300 prize competitions offered in France, women won 49 – perhaps a small number by modern standards, but very significant in an age in which most women did not have any academic training. Indeed, the majority of the winning entries were for poetry competitions, a genre commonly stressed in women's education.

In England, the Royal Society of London also played a significant role in the public sphere and the spread of Enlightenment ideas. In particular, it played a large role in spreading Robert Boyle's experimental philosophy around Europe, and acted as a clearinghouse for intellectual correspondence and exchange. As Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have argued, Robert Boyle was "a founder of the experimental world in which scientists now live and operate". Boyle's method based knowledge on experimentation, which had to be witnessed to provide proper empirical legitimacy. This is where the Royal Society came into play: witnessing had to be a "collective act", and the Royal Society's assembly rooms were ideal locations for relatively public demonstrations. However, not just any witness was considered to be credible; "Oxford professors were accounted more reliable witnesses than Oxfordshire peasants." Two factors were taken into account: a witness's knowledge in the area; and a witness's "moral constitution". In other words, only civil society were considered for Boyle's public.

The book industry

The increased consumption of reading materials of all sorts was one of the key features of the "social" Enlightenment. Developments in the Industrial Revolution allowed consumer goods to be produced in greater quantities at lower prices, encouraging the spread of books, pamphlets, newspapers and journals – "media of the transmission of ideas and attitudes". Commercial development likewise increased the demand for information, along with rising populations and increased urbanisation. However, demand for reading material extended outside of the realm of the commercial, and outside the realm of the upper and middle classes, as evidenced by the Bibliothèque Bleue. Literacy rates are difficult to gauge, but Robert Darnton writes that, in France at least, the rates doubled over the course of the 18th century.

Reading underwent serious changes in the 18th century. In particular, Rolf Engelsing has argued for the existence of a "reading revolution". Until 1750, reading was done "intensively: people tended to own a small number of books and read them repeatedly, often to small audience. After 1750, people began to read "extensively", finding as many books as they could, increasingly reading them alone. On the other hand, as Jonathan Israel writes, Gabriel Naudé was already campaigning for the "universal" library in the mid-17th century. And if this was an ideal only realistic for state institutions and the very wealthy (and indeed, an ideal that was seldom achieved), there are records for extremely large private and state-run libraries throughout Europe in the 17th and 18th-centuries.

Of course, the vast majority of the reading public could not afford to own a private library. And while most of the state-run "universal libraries" set up in the 17th and 18th centuries were open to the public, they were not the only sources of reading material.

On one end of the spectrum was the ''Bibliothèque Bleue'', a collection of cheaply produced books published in Troyes, France. Intended for a largely rural and semi-literate audience these books included almanacs, retellings of medieval romances and condensed versions of popular novels, among other things. While historians, such as Roger Chartier and Robert Darnton, have argued against the Enlightenment's penetration into the lower classes, the Bibliothèque Bleue, at the very least, represents a desire to participate in Enlightenment sociability, whether or not this was actually achieved.

Moving up the classes, a variety of institutions offered readers access to material without needing to buy anything. Libraries that lent out their material for a small price started to appear, and occasionally bookstores would offer a small lending library to their patrons. Coffee houses commonly offered books, journals and sometimes even popular novels to their customers. ''The Tatler'' and ''The Spectator'', two influential periodicals sold from 1709 to 1714, were closely associated with coffee house culture in London, being both read and produced in various establishments in the city. Indeed, this is an example of the triple or even quadruple function of the coffee house: reading material was often obtained, read, discussed and even produced on the premises.

As Darnton describes in ''The Literary Underground of the Old Regime'', it is extremely difficult to determine what people actually read during the Enlightenment. For example, examining the catalogs of private libraries not only gives an image skewed in favor of the classes wealthy enough to afford libraries, it also ignores censured works unlikely to be publicly acknowledged. For this reason, Darnton argues that a study of publishing would be much more fruitful for discerning reading habits.

All across continental Europe, but in France especially, booksellers and publishers had to negotiate censorship laws of varying strictness. The ''Encyclopédie'', for example, narrowly escaped seizure and had to be saved by Malesherbes, the man in charge of the French censure. Indeed, many publishing companies were conveniently located outside of France so as to avoid overzealous French censors. They would smuggle their merchandise – both pirated copies and censured works – across the border, where it would then be transported to clandestine booksellers or small-time peddlers.

Darnton provides a detailed record of one clandestine bookseller's (one de Mauvelain) business in the town of Troyes. At the time, the town's population was 22,000. It had one masonic lodge and an "important" library, even though the literacy rate seems to have been less than 50 percent. Mauvelain's records give us a good representation of what literate Frenchmen might have truly read, since the clandestine nature of his business provided a less restrictive product choice. The most popular category of books was political (319 copies ordered). This included five copies of D’Holbach's ''Système social'', but around 300 libels and pamphlets. Readers were far more interested in sensationalist stories about criminals and political corruption than they were in political theory itself. The second most popular category, "general works" (those books "that did not have a dominant motif and that contained something to offend almost everyone in authority") likewise betrayed the high demand for generally low-brow subversive literature. These works, however, like the vast majority of work produced by Darnton's "grub street hacks", never became part of literary canon, and are largely forgotten today as a result.

Nevertheless, the Enlightenment was not the exclusive domain of illegal literature, as evidenced by the healthy, and mostly legal, publishing industry that existed throughout Europe. "Mostly legal" because even established publishers and book sellers occasionally ran afoul of the law. The Encyclopédie, for example, condemned not only by the King but also by Clement XII, nevertheless found its way into print with the help of the aforementioned Malesherbes and creative use of French censorship law.

But many works were sold without running into any legal trouble at all. Borrowing records from libraries in England, Germany and North America indicate that more than 70 percent of books borrowed were novels; that less than 1 percent of the books were of a religious nature supports a general trend of declining religiosity.

Natural history

A genre that greatly rose in importance was that of scientific literature. Natural history in particular became increasingly popular among the upper classes. Works of natural history include René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur's ''Histoire naturelle des insectes'' and Jacques Gautier d'Agoty's ''La Myologie complète, ou description de tous les muscles du corps humain'' (1746). However, as François-Alexandre Aubert de La Chesnaye des Bois's ''Dictionnaire de la Noblesse'' (1770) indicates, natural history was very often a political affair. As E. C. Spary writes, the classifications used by naturalists "slipped between the natural world and the social ... to establish not only the expertise of the naturalists over the natural, but also the dominance of the natural over the social". From this basis, naturalists could then develop their own social ideals based on their scientific works.

The target audience of natural history was French polite society, evidenced more by the specific discourse of the genre than by the generally high prices of its works. Naturalists catered to polite society's desire for erudition – many texts had an explicit instructive purpose. But the idea of taste (''le goût'') was the real social indicator: to truly be able to categorize nature, one had to have the proper taste, an ability of discretion shared by all members of polite society. In this way natural history spread many of the scientific development of the time, but also provided a new source of legitimacy for the dominant class.

Scientific and literary journals

The many scientific and literary journals (predominantly composed of book reviews) that were published during this time are also evidence of the intellectual side of the Enlightenment. In fact, Jonathan Israel argues that the learned journals, from the 1680s onwards, influenced European intellectual culture to a greater degree than any other "cultural innovation".

The first journal appeared in 1665– the Parisian ''Journal des Scavants'' – but it was not until 1682 that periodicals began to be more widely produced. French and Latin were the dominant languages of publication, but there was also a steady demand for material in German and Dutch. There was generally low demand for English publications on the Continent, which was echoed by England's similar lack of desire for French works. Languages commanding less of an international market – such as Danish, Spanish and Portuguese – found journal success more difficult, and more often than not, a more international language was used instead. Although German did have an international quality to it, it was French that slowly took over Latin's status as the ''lingua franca'' of learned circles. This in turn gave precedence to the publishing industry in Holland, where the vast majority of these French language periodicals were produced.

Israel divides the journals’ intellectual importance into four elements. First was their role in shifting the attention of the "cultivated public" away from "established authorities" to "what was new, innovative, or challenging." Secondly, they did much to promote the "‘enlightened’ ideals of toleration and intellectual objectivity." Thirdly, the journals were an implicit critique of existing notions of universal truth monopolized by monarchies, parliaments, and religious authorities. The journals suggested a new source of knowledge – through science and reason – that undermined these sources of authority. And finally, they advanced the "Christian Enlightenment", a notion of Enlightenment that, despite its advocacy for new knowledge sources, upheld "the legitimacy of God-ordained authority."

The Republic of Letters

The term "Republic of Letters" was coined by Pierre Bayle in 1664, in his journal ''Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres''. Towards the end of the 18th century, the editor of ''Histoire de la République des Lettres en France'', a literary survey, described the Republic of Letters as being:

In the midst of all the governments that decide the fate of men; in the bosom of so many states, the majority of them despotic ... there exists a certain realm which holds sway only over the mind ... that we honour with the name Republic, because it preserves a measure of independence, and because it is almost its essence to be free. It is the realm of talent and of thought. Immanuel Kant considered written communication essential to his conception of the public sphere; once everyone was a part of the "reading public", then society could be said to be enlightened. The people who participated in the Republic of Letters, such as Diderot and Voltaire, are frequently known today as important Enlightenment figures. Indeed, the men who wrote Diderot's ''Encyclopédie'' arguably formed a microcosm of the larger "republic".

Dena Goodman has argued that women played a major role in French salons—''salonnières'' to complement the male ''philosophes''. Discursively, she bases the Republic of Letters in polite conversation and letter writing; its principal social institution was the salon.

Robert Darnton's ''The Literary Underground of the Old Regime'' was the first major historical work to critique this ideal model. He argues that, by the mid-18th century, the established men of letters (''gens de lettres'') had fused with the elites (''les grands'') of French society. Consider the definition of "Goût" (taste) as written by Voltaire in the ''Dictionnaire philosophique'' (taken from Darnton): "Taste is like philosophy. It belongs to a very small number of privileged souls ... It is unknown in bourgeois families, where one is constantly occupied with the care of one's fortune". In the words of Darnton, Voltaire "thought that the Enlightenment should begin with the ''grands''". The historian cites similar opinions from d'Alembert and Louis Sébastien Mercier.

Grub Street

Darnton argues that the result of this "fusion of ''gens de lettres'' and ''grands''" was the creation of an oppositional literary sphere, Grub Street, the domain of a "multitude of versifiers and would-be authors". These men, lured by the glory of the Republic of Letters, came to Paris to become authors, only to discover that their dreams of literary success were little more than chimeras. The literary market simply could not support large numbers of writers, who, in any case, were very poorly remunerated by the publishing-bookselling guilds. The writers of Grub Street, the Grub Street Hacks, were left feeling extremely bitter about the relative success of their literary cousins, the men of letters.

This bitterness and hatred found an outlet in the literature the Grub Street Hacks produced, typified by the ''libelle''. Written mostly in the form of pamphlets, the ''libelles'' "slandered the court, the Church, the aristocracy, the academies, the salons, everything elevated and respectable, including the monarchy itself". Darnton designates ''Le Gazetier cuirassé'' by Charles Théveneau de Morande as the prototype of the genre. Consider:

The devout wife of a certain Maréchal de France (who suffers from an imaginary lung disease), finding a husband of that species too delicate, considers it her religious duty to spare him and so condemns herself to the crude caresses of her butler, who would still be a lackey if he hadn't proven himself so robust.

or,

The public is warned that an epidemic disease is raging among the girls of the Opera, that is has begun to reach the ladies of the court, and that it has even been communicated to their lackeys. This disease elongates the face, destroys the complexion, reduces the weight, and causes horrible ravages where it becomes situated. There are lades without teeth, others without eyebrows, and some are completely paralyzed.

It was Grub Street literature that was most read by the reading public during the Enlightenment. More importantly, Darnton argues, the Grub Street hacks inherited the "revolutionary spirit" once displayed by the ''philosophes'', and paved the way for the Revolution by desacralizing figures of political, moral and religious authority in France.

Coffee houses

The first English coffeehouse opened in Oxford in 1650. Brian Cowan argues that Oxford coffeehouses developed into "penny universities", offering a locus of learning that was less formal than structured institutions. These penny universities occupied a significant position in Oxford academic life, as they were frequented by virtuosi, who conducted their research on the premises. According to Cowan, "the coffeehouse was a place for like-minded scholars to congregate, to read, as well as learn from and to debate with each other, but was emphatically not a university institution, and the discourse there was of a far different order than any university tutorial."

Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli – François Procope – established the first café in Paris, the Café Procope, in 1686; by the 1720s there were around 400 cafés in the city. The Café Procope in particular became a centre of Enlightenment, welcoming such celebrities as Voltaire and Rousseau. The Café Procope was where Diderot and D’Alembert decided to create the ''Encyclopédie''. Robert Darnton in particular has studied Parisian café conversation in great detail. He describes how the cafés were one of the various "nerve centers" for ''bruits publics'', public noise or rumour. These ''bruits'' were allegedly a much better source of information than were the actual newspapers available at the time.

Debating societies

The Debating Societies that rapidly came into existence in 1780 London present an almost perfect example of the public sphere during the Enlightenment. Donna T Andrew provides four separate origins:

Clubs of fifty or more men who, at the beginning of the 18th century, met in pubs to discuss religious issues and affairs of state.

Mooting clubs, set up by law students to practice rhetoric.

Spouting clubs, established to help actors train for theatrical roles.

John Henley's Oratory, which mixed outrageous sermons with even more absurd questions, like "Whether Scotland be anywhere in the world?"

In any event, popular debating societies began, in the late 1770s, to move into more "genteel", or respectable rooms, a change which helped establish a new standard of sociability: "order, decency, and liberality", in the words of the Religious Society of Old Portugal Street. Respectability was also encouraged by the higher admissions prices (ranging from 6d. to 3s.), which also contributed to the upkeep of the newer establishments. The backdrop to these developments was what Andrew calls "an explosion of interest in the theory and practice of public elocution". The debating societies were commercial enterprises that responded to this demand, sometimes very successfully. Indeed, some societies welcomed from 800 to 1200 spectators a night. These societies discussed an extremely wide range of topics. One broad area was women: societies debated over "male and female qualities", courtship, marriage, and the role of women in the public sphere. Societies also discussed political issues, varying from recent events to "the nature and limits of political authority", and the nature of suffrage. Debates on religion rounded out the subject matter. It is important to note, however, that the critical subject matter of these debates did not necessarily translate into opposition to the government. In other words, the results of the debate quite frequently upheld the status quo.

From a historical standpoint, one of the most important features of the debating society was their openness to the public; women attended and even participated in almost every debating society, which were likewise open to all classes providing they could pay the entrance fee. Once inside, spectators were able to participate in a largely egalitarian form of sociability that helped spread "Enlightening ideas".

Freemasonic lodges

Historians have recently been debating the extent to which Freemasonry was part of, or even a main factor in the Enlightenment. On the one hand, historians agree that the famous leaders of the Enlightenment included Freemasons such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Pope, Horace Walpole, Sir Robert Walpole, Mozart, Goethe, Frederick the Great, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington. On the other side, historians such as Robert Roswell Palmer concluded that even in France, Masons were politically "innocuous if not ridiculous" and did not act as a group. American historians, while noting that Benjamin Franklin and George Washington were indeed active Masons, have downplayed the importance of Freemasonry in the era of the American Revolution because the movement was non-political and included both Patriots and their enemy the Loyalists. Regarding the movement's influence on the European contintent, German historian Reinhart Koselleck claimed that "On the Continent there were two social structures that left a decisive imprint on the Age of Enlightenment: the Republic of Letters and the Masonic lodges.", while professor at University of Glasgow Thomas Munck argues that "although the Masons did promote international and cross-social contacts which were essentially non-religious and broadly in agreement with enlightened values, they can hardly be described as a major radical or reformist network in their own right."

Freemasonic lodges originated from English and Scottish stonemasonic guilds in the 17th century. In the 18th century, they expanded into an extremely widespread collection of interconnected (to varying degrees) men's, and occasionally women's, associations which Margaret Jacob contends had their own mythologies and special codes of conduct - including a communal understanding of liberty and equality inherited from guild sociability – "liberty, fraternity, and equality" The remarkable similarity between these values, which were generally common in Britain as on the Continent, and the French Revolutionary slogan of "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" spawned many conspiracy theories. Notably, Abbé Barruel traced the origins of the Jacobins – and hence the Revolution – to the French freemasons.

Freemasonry was officially established on the continent of Europe in 1734, when a lodge was set up in The Hague, although the first "fully formed lodge" appears to have met in 1721 in Rotterdam. Similarly, there are records of a Parisian lodge meeting in 1725 or 1726. As Daniel Roche writes, freemasonry was particularly prevalent in France – by 1789, there were perhaps as many as 100,000 French Masons, making Freemasonry the most popular of all Enlightenment associations. Freemasonry does not appear to have been confined to Western Europe, however, as Margaret Jacob writes of lodges in Saxony in 1729 and in Russia in 1731.

Conspiracy theories aside, it is likely that masonic lodges had an effect on society as a whole. Jacob argues that they "reconstituted the polity and established a constitutional form of self-government, complete with constitutions and laws, elections and representatives". In other words, the micro-society set up within the lodges constituted a normative model for society as a whole. This was especially true on the Continent: when the first lodges began to appear in the 1730s, their embodiment of British values was often seen as threatening by state authorities. For example, the Parisian lodge that met in the mid 1720s was composed of English Jacobite exiles.

Furthermore, freemasons all across Europe made reference to the Enlightenment in general in the 18th century. In French lodges, for example, the line "As the means to be enlightened I search for the enlightened" was a part of their initiation rites. British lodges assigned themselves the duty to "initiate the unenlightened". This did not necessarily link lodges to the irreligious, but neither did this exclude them from the occasional heresy. In fact, many lodges praised the Grand Architect, the masonic terminology for the divine being who created a scientifically ordered universe.

On the other hand, Daniel Roche contests freemasonry's claims for egalitarianism, writing that "the real equality of the lodges was elitist", only attracting men of similar social backgrounds. This lack of real equality was made explicit by the constitution of the Lausanne Switzerland lodge (1741):

The order of freemasons is a society of confraternity and equality, and to this end is represented under the emblem of a level ... a brother renders to another brother the honour and deference that is justly due him in proportion to his rank in the civil society.

Elitism was beneficial for some members of society. The presence, for example, of noble women in the French "lodges of adoption" that formed in the 1780s was largely due to the close ties shared between these lodges and aristocratic society.

Salons

A historiographical overview

Enlightenment historiography began in the period itself, from what "Enlightenment figures" said about their work. A dominant element was the intellectual angle they took. D'Alembert's ''Preliminary Discourse of l'Encyclopédie'' provides a history of the Enlightenment which comprises a chronological list of developments in the realm of knowledge – of which the ''Encyclopédie'' forms the pinnacle. A more philosophical example of this was the 1783 essay contest (in itself an activity typical of the Enlightenment) announced by the Berlin newspaper ''Berlinische Monatsschrift'', which asked that very question: "What is Enlightenment?" Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn was among those who responded, referring to Enlightenment as a process by which man was educated in the use of reason (''Jerusalem'', 1783). Immanuel Kant also wrote a response, referring to Enlightenment as "man's release from his self-incurred tutelage", tutelage being "man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another". This intellectual model of interpretation has been adopted by many historians since the 18th century, and is perhaps the most commonly used interpretation today.

Dorinda Outram provides a good example of a standard, intellectual definition of the Enlightenment:

Like the French Revolution, the Enlightenment has long been hailed as the foundation of modern Western political and intellectual culture. It has been frequently linked to the French Revolution of 1789. However, as Roger Chartier points out, it was perhaps the Revolution that "invented the Enlightenment by attempting to root its legitimacy in a corpus of texts and founding authors reconciled and united ... by their preparation of a rupture with the old world". In other words, the revolutionaries elevated to heroic status those philosophers, such as Voltaire and Rousseau, who could be used to justify their radical break with the Ancien Régime. In any case, two 19th-century historians of the Enlightenment, Hippolyte Taine and Alexis de Tocqueville, did much to solidify this link of Enlightenment causing revolution and the intellectual perception of the Enlightenment itself.

In his ''l Régime'' (1876), Hippolyte Taine traced the roots of the French Revolution back to French Classicism. However, this was not without the help of the scientific view of the world [of the Enlightenment], which wore down the "monarchical and religious dogma of the old regime". In other words then, Taine was only interested in the Enlightenment insofar as it advanced scientific discourse and transmitted what he perceived to be the intellectual legacy of French classicism.

Alexis de Tocqueville painted a more elaborate picture of the Enlightenment in ''L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution'' (1850). For de Tocqueville, the Revolution was the inevitable result of the radical opposition created in the 18th century between the monarchy and the men of letters of the Enlightenment. These men of letters constituted a sort of "substitute aristocracy that was both all-powerful and without real power". This illusory power came from the rise of "public opinion", born when absolutist centralization removed the nobility and the bourgeosie from the political sphere. The "literary politics" that resulted promoted a discourse of equality and was hence in fundamental opposition to the monarchical regime.

From a historiographical point of view, de Tocqueville presents an interesting case. He was primarily concerned with the workings of political power under the Ancien Régime and the philosophical principles of the men of letters. However, there is a distinctly social quality to his analysis. In the words of Chartier, de Tocqueville "clearly designates ... the cultural effects of transformation in the forms of the exercise of power". Nevertheless, for a serious cultural approach, one has to wait another century for the work of historians such as Robert Darnton, ''The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800'' (1979).

In the meantime, though, intellectual history remained the dominant historiographical trend. The German scholar Ernst Cassirer is typical, writing in his ''The Philosophy of the Enlightenment'' (19321951) that the Enlightenment was " a part and a special phase of that whole intellectual development through which modern philosophic thought gained its characteristic self-confidence and self-consciousness". Borrowing from Kant, Cassirer states that Enlightenment is the process by which the spirit "achieves clarity and depth in its understanding of its own nature and destiny, and of its own fundamental character and mission". In short, the Enlightenment was a series of philosophical, scientific and otherwise intellectual developments that took place mostly in the 18th century – the birthplace of intellectual modernity.

Recent work

Only in the 1970s did interpretation of the Enlightenment allow for a more heterogeneous and even extra-European vision. A. Owen Aldridge demonstrated how Enlightenment ideas spread to Spanish colonies and how they interacted with indigenous cultures, while Franco Venturi explored how the Enlightenment took place in normally unstudied areas – Italy, Greece, the Balkans, Poland, Hungary, and Russia.

Robert Darnton's cultural approach launched a new dimension of studies. He said, :

"Perhaps the Enlightenment was a more down-to-earth affair than the rarefied climate of opinion described by textbook writers, and we should question the overly highbrow, overly metaphysical view of intellectual life in the eighteenth century."

Darnton examines the underbelly of the French book industry in the 18th century, examining the world of book smuggling and the lives of those writers (the "Grub Street Hacks") who never met the success of their ''philosophe'' cousins. In short, rather than concerning himself with Enlightenment canon, Darnton studies "what Frenchmen wanted to read", and who wrote, published and distributed it. Similarly, in ''The Business of Enlightenment. A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775–1800'', Darnton states that there is no need to further study the encyclopedia itself, as "the book has been analyzed and anthologized dozen of times: to recapitulate all the studies of its intellectual content would be redundant". He instead, as the title of the book suggests, examines the social conditions that brought about the production of the ''Encyclopédie''. This is representative of the social interpretation as a whole – an examination of the social conditions that brought about Enlightenment ideas rather than a study of the ideas themselves.

The work of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas was central to this emerging social interpretation; his seminal work ''The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere'' (published under the title ''Strukturwandel der Öffentlicheit'' in 1962) was translated into English in 1989. The book outlines the creation of the "bourgeois public sphere" in 18th century Europe. Essentially, this public sphere describes the new venues and modes of communication allowing for rational exchange that appeared in the 18th century. Habermas argued that the public sphere was bourgeois, egalitarian, rational, and independent from the state, making it the ideal venue for intellectuals to critically examine contemporary politics and society, away from the interference of established authority.

Habermas's work, though influential, has come under criticism on all fronts. While the public sphere is generally an integral component of social interpretations of the Enlightenment, numerous historians have brought into question whether the public sphere was bourgeois, oppositional to the state, independent from the state, or egalitarian.

These historiographical developments have done much to open up the study of Enlightenment to a multiplicity of interpretations. In ''A Social History of Truth'' (1994), for example, Steven Shapin makes the largely sociological argument that, in 17th-century England, the mode of sociability known as civility became the primary discourse of truth; for a statement to have the potential to be considered true, it had to be expressed according to the rules of civil society.

Feminist interpretations have also appeared, with Dena Goodman being one notable example. In ''The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment'' (1994), Goodman argues that many women in fact played an essential part in the French Enlightenment, due to the role they played as ''salonnières'' in Parisians salons. These salons "became the civil working spaces of the project of Enlightenment" and women, as salonnières, were "the legitimate governors of [the] potentially unruly discourse" that took place within. On the other hand, Carla Hesse, in ''The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern'' (2001), argues that "female participation in the public cultural life of the Old Regime was ... relatively marginal". It was instead the French Revolution, by destroying the old cultural and economic restraints of patronage and corporatism (guilds), that opened French society to female participation, particularly in the literary sphere.

All this is not to say that intellectual interpretations no longer exist. Jonathan Israel, for example, in ''Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752'' (2006), constructs an argument that is primarily intellectual in scope. Like many historians before him, he sets the Enlightenment within the context of the French Revolution to follow. Israel argues that only an intellectual interpretation can adequately explain the radical break with Ancien Régime society.

Important intellectuals

Thomas Abbt (1738–1766) German. Author of "Vom Tode für's Vaterland" (On dying for one's nation).

Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717–1783) French. Mathematician and physicist, one of the editors of Encyclopédie.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher who started the revolution in empirical thought that characterized much of the enlightenment.

Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) French. Literary critic known for his newsletter "Nouvelles de la république des lettres" and his powerful ''Dictionnaire historique et critique'', and one of the earliest influences on the Enlightenment thinkers to advocate tolerance between the difference religious beliefs.

Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794) Italian. criminal law reformer, best known for his treatise ''On Crimes and Punishments'' (1764).

Balthasar Bekker (1634–1698) Dutch, a key figure in the Early Enlightenment. In his book ''De Philosophia Cartesiana'' (1668) Bekker argued that theology and philosophy each had their separate terrain and that Nature can no more be explained from Scripture than can theological truth be deduced from Nature.

George Berkeley (1685–1753) Irish. Philosopher and mathematician famous for developing the theory of subjective idealism.

Justus Henning Boehmer (1674–1749), German ecclesiastical jurist, one of the first reformer of the church law and the civil law which was basis for further reforms and maintained until the 20th century.

James Boswell (1740–1795) Scottish. Biographer of Samuel Johnson, helped established the norms for writing biography in general.

G.L. Buffon (1707–1788) French biologist. Author of ''L'Histoire Naturelle'' considered Natural Selection and the similarities between humans and apes.

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Irish. Parliamentarian and political philosopher, best known for pragmatism, considered important to both Enlightenment and conservative thinking.

Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757)

Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723) Romanian. Philosopher, historian, composer, musicologist, linguist, ethnographer, and geographer.

Francisco Javier Clavijero (1731–1787) Mexican. Historian, best known for his ''Antique History of Mexico''.

Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794) French. Philosopher, mathematician, and early political scientist who devised the concept of a Condorcet method.

James Cook (1728–1779) – British naval captain. Explored much of the Pacific including New Zealand, Australia and Hawaii.

Ekaterina Dashkova (1743–1810) Russian. Director of the Imperial Academy of Arts and Sciences (known now as the Russian Academy of Sciences).

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French. Founder of the Encyclopédie, speculated on free will and attachment to material objects, contributed to the theory of literature.

French Encyclopédistes (1700s)

Denis Fonvizin (1744–1792) Russian. Writer and playwright.

José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (1766–1840) Paraguayan. First president of Paraguay. Introduced radical political ideas never-before seen in South America to Paraguay, making his country prosperous and more secure than any other in South-America.

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American. Statesman, scientist, political philosopher, author. As a philosopher known for his writings on nationality, economic matters, aphorisms published in Poor Richard's Almanac and polemics in favor of American Independence. Involved with writing the United States Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1787.

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) English. Historian best known for his ''Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire''.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) is closely identified with Enlightenment values, progressing from ''Sturm und Drang'' ("Storm and Stress"); leader in Weimar Classicism.

Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793), French playwright and activist who championed feminist politics.

Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804) American. Economist, political theorist and politician. A major protagonist for the Constitution of the United States, and the single greatest contributor to the Federalist Papers, advocating for the constitution's ratification through detailed examinations of its construction, philosophical and moral basis, and intent.

Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) Austrian composer who revolutionized the symphonic form.

Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771)

Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) German. Theologian and linguist. Proposed that language determines thought, introduced concepts of ethnic study and nationalism, influential on later Romantic thinkers. Early supporter of democracy and republican self rule.

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) English philosopher, who wrote ''Leviathan'', a key text in political philosophy. While Hobbes justifies absolute monarchy, this work is the first to posit that the temporal power of a monarch comes about, not because God has ordained that he be monarch, but because his subjects have freely yielded their own power and freedom to him - in other words, Hobbes replaces the divine right of kings with an early formulation of the social contract. Hobbes' work was condemned by reformers for its defense of absolutism, and by traditionalists for its claim that the power of government derives from the power of its subjects rather than the will of God.

Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789) French. Author, encyclopaedist and Europe's first outspoken atheist. Roused much controversy over his criticism of religion as a whole in his work ''The System of Nature''.

Robert Hooke (1635–1703) English, probably the leading experimenter of his age, Curator of Experiments for the Royal Society. Performed the work which quantified such concepts as Boyle's Law and the inverse-square nature of gravitation, father of the science of microscopy.

David Hume (1711–1776) Scottish. Historian, philosopher and economist. Best known for his empiricism and rational skepticism, advanced doctrines of naturalism and material causes. Influenced Kant and Adam Smith.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German. Philosopher and physicist. Established critical philosophy on a systematic basis, proposed a material theory for the origin of the solar system, wrote on ethics and morals. Prescribed a politics of Enlightenment in ''What is Enlightenment?'' (1784). Influenced by Hume and Isaac Newton. Important figure in German Idealism, and important to the work of Fichte and Hegel.

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) American. Statesman, political philosopher, educator. As a philosopher best known for the United States Declaration of Independence (1776) and his interpretation of the United States Constitution (1787) which he pursued as president. Argued for natural rights as the basis of all states, argued that violation of these rights negates the contract which bind a people to their rulers and that therefore there is an inherent "Right to Revolution."

Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (1744–1811), Main figure of the Spanish Enlightenment. Preeminent statesman.

Hugo Kołłątaj (1750–1812) Polish. He was active in the Commission for National Education and the Society for Elementary Textbooks, and reformed the Kraków Academy, of which he was rector in 1783–86. He co-authored the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's Constitution of May 3, 1791, and founded the Assembly of Friends of the Government Constitution to assist in the document's implementation.

Ignacy Krasicki (1735–1801): Polish. Leading poet of the Polish Enlightenment.

Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse (1741–?1788) – French naval captain. Lapérouse was appointed in 1785 by Louis XVI and his minister of marine, the Marquis de Castries, to lead an expedition around the world. He vanished in Oceania with the remains of his expedition being found later in 1826 at the island of Vanikoro, which is part of the Santa Cruz group of islands. Lapérouse was a significant French figure of the Age of Enlightenment.

Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794)French; a founder of modern chemistry; executed in the French Revolution for his politics

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) German philosopher & mathematician; rival of Newton.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) German. Dramatist, critic, political philosopher. Created theatre in the German language

Carl von Linné (Carl Linnaeus) (1707–1778) Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of binomial nomenclature. He is known as the father of modern taxonomy

John Locke (1632–1704) English Philosopher. Important empiricist who expanded and extended the work of Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes. Seminal thinker in the realm of the relationship between the state and the individual, the contractual basis of the state and the rule of law. Argued for personal liberty emphasizing the rights of property; it is this emphasis the American constitution owes much to. Among those of whom his writings influenced were Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. This influence is reflected in the American Declaration of Independence.

Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–1765) Russian. Polymath, scientist and writer, who made important contributions to literature, education, and science.

James Madison (1751–1836) American. Statesman and political philosopher. Played a key role in the writing of the United States Constitution and providing a theoretical justification for it in his contributions to the Federalist Papers.

Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) German. Philosopher of Jewish Enlightenment in Prussia (Haskalah), honoured by his friend Lessing in his drama as ''Nathan the Wise''.

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714–1799) Scottish. Philosopher, jurist, pre-evolutionary thinker and contributor to linguistic evolution. See Scottish Enlightenment

Josef Vratislav Monse (1733–1793) Czech. Professor of Law at University of Olomouc, leading figure of Enlightenment in the Habsburg Monarchy

Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro (1676–1764) Spanish, was the most prominent promoter of the critical empiricist attitude at the dawn of the Spanish Enlightenment. See also the Spanish Martín Sarmiento (1695–1772)

Montesquieu (1689–1755) French political thinker. He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, taken for granted in modern discussions of government and implemented in many constitutions all over the world. Political scientist, Donald Lutz, found that Montesquieu was the most frequently quoted authority on government and politics in colonial pre-revolutionary British America, cited more by the American founders than any source except for the Bible.

Leandro Fernández de Moratín (1760–1828) Spanish. Dramatist and translator, support of republicanism and free thinking. Transitional figure to Romanticism.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) Austrian. Classical composer, Freemason, devout Catholic, monarchist.

José Celestino Mutis (1755–1808), Spanish botanist and mathematician, lead the first botanic expeditions to South America, and built a major collection of plants.

Nikolay Novikov (1744–1818) Russian. Philanthropist and journalist who sought to raise the culture of Russian readers and publicly argued with the Empress. See Russian Enlightenment for other prominent figures.

Zaharije Orfelin (1726–1785) Serbian. Fluent in many languages, he was a poet, writer, historian, translator, engraver, editor, publisher and many other things.

Dositej Obradović (1739–1811) Serbian. Writer, philosopher and linguist and one of the most influential proponents of Serbian national and cultural Renaissance.

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English/American pamphleteer, most famous for ''Common Sense'' (1776) calling for American independence as the most rational solution

William Paley (1743–1805) English theologian known for his exposition of the teleological argument and rational religion.

Marquis of Pombal (1699–1782) Portuguese statesman notable for his swift and competent leadership in the aftermath of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. He also implemented sweeping economic policies to regulate commercial activity and standardize quality throughout the country. The term Pombaline is used to describe not only his tenure, but also the architectural style which formed after the great earthquake.

Stanisław August Poniatowski (1732–98), the last king of independent Poland, a leading light of the Enlightenment in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and co-author of one of the world's first modern constitutions, the Constitution of May 3, 1791.

François Quesney (1694–1774) French economist of the Physiocratic school. * Alexander Radishchev (1749–1802) Russian. Writer and philosopher. He brought the tradition of radicalism in Russian literature to prominence with the publication in 1790 of his Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow.

Thomas Reid (1710–1796) Scottish. Presbyterian minister and Philosopher. Contributed greatly to the idea of Common-Sense philosophy and was Hume's most famous contemporary critic. Best known for his An Inquiry Into The Human Mind.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Swiss political philosopher; influenced many Enlightenment figures but did not himself believe in primacy of reason and is closer to Romanticism.

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish economist and philosopher. He wrote ''The Wealth of Nations'', in which he argued that wealth was not money in itself, but wealth was derived from the added value in manufactured items produced by both invested capital and labour. He is sometimes considered to be the founding father of the laissez-faire economic theory, but in fact argues for some degree of government control in order to maintain equity. Just prior to this he wrote ''Theory of Moral Sentiments'', explaining how it is humans function and interact through what he calls sympathy, setting up important context for ''The Wealth of Nations''.

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher who is considered to have laid the groundwork for the 18th-century Enlightenment.

Alexander Sumarokov (1717–1777) Russian. Poet and playwright who single-handedly created classical theatre in Russia

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) Natural philosopher and theologian whose search for the operation of the soul in the body led him to construct a detailed metaphysical model for spiritual-natural causation.

Vasily Tatishchev (1686–1750)Russian. Ethnographer and historian.

Vasily Trediakovsky (1703–1768) Russian. Poet, essayist and playwright who helped lay the foundations of classical Russian literature

François-Marie Arouet (pen name Voltaire) (1694–1778) French Enlightenment writer, essayist, deist and philosopher. He wrote several books, the most famous of which is ''Dictionnaire Philosophique'', in which he argued that organized religion is pernicious. He was the Enlightenment's most vigorous antireligious polemicist, as well as being a highly well known advocate of intellectual freedom.

Adam Weishaupt (1748–1830) German who founded the Order of the Illuminati.

Christian Wolff (1679–1754) German philosopher.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) British writer, philosopher, and feminist.

See also

American Enlightenment

Atlantic Revolutions (American Revolution, French Revolution, Latin American Revolutions, etc.)

Counter-Enlightenment

Deism

Enlightened absolutism

Public Sphere

Science in the Age of Enlightenment

References

Further reading

Reference and surveys

Becker, Carl L. ''The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers.'' (1932)

Bronner, Stephen Eric. '' The Great Divide: The Enlightenment and its Critics''

Burns, William. ''Science in the Enlightenment: An Encyclopedia'' (2003) 353pp

Chisick, Harvey. ''Historical Dictionary of the Enlightenment.'' 2005. 512 pp

Delon, Michel. ''Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment'' (2001) 1480pp

Dupre, Louis. ''The Enlightenment & the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture'' 2004

Gay, Peter. ''The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism'' (1966, 2nd ed. 1995), 952 pp; excerpt and text search vol 1; ''The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom'', (1969 2nd ed. 1995), a highly influential study excerpt and text search vol 2;

Greensides F, Hyland P, Gomez O (ed.). ''The Enlightenment'' (2002)

Fitzpatrick, Martin et al., eds. ''The Enlightenment World.'' (2004). 714pp; 39 essays by scholars online edition

Hazard, Paul. ''European thought in the 18th century: From Montesquieu to Lessing'' (1965)

Himmelfarb, Gertrude. ''The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments'' (2004) excerpt and text search

Jacob, Margaret ''Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents'' 2000

Kors, Alan Charles. ''Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment'' (4 vol. 1990; 2nd ed. 2003), 1984pp excerpt and text search; also complete text online at www.oxfordreference.com

Munck, Thomas. ''Enlightenment: A Comparative Social History, 1721–1794'' England''. (1994)

Outram, Dorinda. ''The Enlightenment''(1995) 157pp excerpt and text search

Outram, Dorinda. ''Panorama of the Enlightenment'' (2006), emphasis on Germany; heavily illustrated

Porter, Roy. ''The Enlightenment'' (2nd ed. 2001) excerpt and text search

Reill, Peter Hanns, and Wilson, Ellen Judy. ''Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment.'' (2nd ed. 2004). 670 pp.

Yolton, John W. et al. ''The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment.'' 1992. 581 pp.

Specialty studies

Aldridge, A. Owen (ed.). ''The Ibero-American Enlightenment'' (1971).

Andrew, Donna T. "Popular Culture and Public Debate: London 1780". ''The Historical Journal'', Vol. 39, No. 2. (June 1996), pp 405–423. in JSTOR

Brewer, Daniel. ''The Enlightenment Past: reconstructing 18th-century French thought''. (2008).

Broadie, Alexander. ''The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation'' (2007)

Broadie, Alexander. ''The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment'' (2003) excerpt and text search

Bronner, Stephen Eric. ''Interpreting the Enlightenment: Metaphysics, Critique, and Politics'', 2004

Brown, Stuart, ed. ''British Philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment'' (2002)

Buchan, James. ''Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh's Moment of the Mind'' (2004) excerpt and text search

Campbell, R.S. and Skinner, A.S., (eds.) ''The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment'', Edinburgh, 1982

Cassirer, Ernst. ''The Philosophy of the Enlightenment.'' 1955. a highly influential study by a neoKantian philosopher excerpt and text search

Chartier, Roger. ''The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution''. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Duke University Press, 1991.

Cowan, Brian, ''The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse''. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Darnton, Robert. ''The Literary Underground of the Old Regime''. (1982).

Edelstein, Dan. ''The Enlightenment: A Genealogy'' (University of Chicago Press; 2010) 209 pages

Goodman, Dena. ''The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment''. (1994).

Hesse, Carla. ''The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern''. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Hankins, Thomas L. ''Science and the Enlightenment'' (1985).

Israel, Jonathan I. ''Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752'' (2008)

Israel, Jonathan. ''Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750''. (2001).

Israel, Jonathan. ''A Revolution of the Mind - Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy''. (2009).

May, Henry F. ''The Enlightenment in America.'' 1976. 419 pp.

Melton, James Van Horn. ''The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe''. (2001).

Porter, Roy. ''The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment.'' 2000. 608 pp. excerpt and text search

Redkop, Benjamin. ''The Enlightenment and Community'', 1999

Reid-Maroney, Nina. ''Philadelphia's Enlightenment, 1740–1800: Kingdom of Christ, Empire of Reason.'' 2001. 199 pp.

Roche, Daniel. ''France in the Enlightenment''. (1998).

Sorkin, David. ''The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna'' (2008)

Staloff, Darren. ''Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding.'' 2005. 419 pp. excerpt and text search

Till, Nicholas. ''Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart's Operas.'' 1993. 384 pp.

Venturi, Franco. ''Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment''. George Macaulay Trevelyan Lecture, (1971)

Primary sources

Broadie, Alexander, ed. ''The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology'' (2001) excerpt and text search

Diderot, Denis. ''Rameau's Nephew'' and ''First Satire.'(2008).

Diderot, Denis. ''The Encyclopédie of Diderot and D'Alembert: Selected Articles'' (1969) excerpt and text search

Gomez, Olga, et al. eds. ''The Enlightenment: A Sourcebook and Reader'' (2001) excerpt and text search

Kramnick, Issac, ed. ''The Portable Enlightenment Reader''(1995) excerpt and text search

Category:1700s Category:Historical eras Category:History of philosophy Category:History of Europe by period Enlightenment The Category:Secularism Category:Western culture Enlightenment Category:18th-century philosophy

als:Aufklärung ar:عصر التنوير an:Ilustración az:Maarifçilik dövrü zh-min-nan:Khé-bông Sî-tāi be:Асветніцтва be-x-old:Эпоха Асьветніцтва bar:Aufklärung (neuzeitlich) bs:Prosvjetiteljstvo br:Kantved ar Sklêrijenn bg:Просвещение ca:Il·lustració cs:Osvícenství cy:Yr Oleuedigaeth da:Oplysningstiden de:Aufklärung et:Valgustusajastu el:Διαφωτισμός es:Ilustración eo:Klerismo ext:Ilustración eu:Argien mendea fa:عصر روشنگری hif:Age of Enlightenment fo:Upplýsingartíðin fr:Siècle des Lumières fy:Ferljochting gd:Soillseachadh gl:Ilustración ko:계몽주의 hr:Prosvjetiteljstvo id:Abad Pencerahan ia:Illuminismo is:Heimspeki 18. aldar it:Illuminismo he:עידן הנאורות ka:განმანათლებლობა kk:Ағарту дәуірі sw:Zama za Mwangaza la:Aevum illuminationis lv:Apgaismības laikmets lb:Zäitalter vun de Lumières lt:Švietimo amžius li:Öpkläreng hu:Felvilágosodás mk:Просветителство arz:عصر التنوير ml:ജ്ഞാനോദയകാലം ms:Zaman Kesedaran mwl:Eiluminismo nl:Verlichting (stroming) ja:啓蒙時代 no:Opplysningstiden nn:Opplysingstida oc:Sègle de las Luses pnb:چانن ویلہ nds:Opklärung pl:Oświecenie (okres) pt:Iluminismo ro:Iluminism rm:Illuminissem ru:Эпоха Просвещения sq:Iluminizmi scn:Illuminismu simple:Age of Enlightenment sk:Osvietenstvo sl:Razsvetljenstvo sr:Просветитељство sh:Prosvjetiteljstvo fi:Valistus sv:Upplysningstiden tl:Panahon ng Pagkamulat ta:அறிவொளிக் காலம் tt:Мәгърифәтчелек th:ยุคเรืองปัญญา tr:Aydınlanma Çağı tk:Aň-bilim eýýamy uk:Просвітництво ur:دور استبصار za:Buqmoengz Seizdaih vi:Thời kỳ Khai sáng fiu-vro:Valgustusaig war:Panahon han Nalamragan zh-yue:啟蒙時期 bat-smg:Švėitėma omžios zh:啟蒙時代

Name	Jean-Claude Van Damme
Birth name	Jean-Claude Camille François Van Varenberg
Birth date	October 18, 1960
Birth place	Berchem-Sainte-Agathe, Brussels, Belgium
Yearsactive	1984–present (acting)
Occupation	Actor, martial artist, director
Spouse	1 child)and (1999–present); 2 children) }}

Jean-Claude Camille François Van Varenberg (born 18 October 1960), professionally known as Jean-Claude Van Damme, is a Belgian martial artist and actor, best known for his martial arts action films, the most successful of which include ''Bloodsport'' (1988), ''Kickboxer'' (1989), ''Double Impact'' (1991), ''Universal Soldier'' (1992), ''Hard Target'' (1993), ''Timecop'' (1994), and ''JCVD'' (2008). He is known as "The Muscles from Brussels", "JCVD" and "Van Damage".

After studying martial arts intensively from the age of ten, Van Damme achieved national success in Belgium as a martial artist and bodybuilder, earning the "Mr. Belgium" bodybuilding title. He immigrated to the United States in 1982 to pursue a career in film, and achieved success with ''Bloodsport'' (1988), based on a story written by Frank Dux. He attained subsequent box office success with ''Timecop'' (1994), which grossed over $100 million worldwide and became his most financially successful film.

Early life

Van Damme was born in Sint-Agatha-Berchem, Brussels, Belgium, the son of Eliana and Eugène Van Varenberg, who was an accountant and owned a flower shop. He began martial arts at the age of ten, enrolled by his father in a Shotokan karate school. His styles consist of kickboxing, Shotokan karate, Muay Thai and Taekwondo. He eventually earned his black belt in karate. He started lifting weights to improve his physique, which eventually led to a Mr. Belgium bodybuilding title.

Career

Name	Jean-Claude Van Damme
Other names	The Muscles from Brussels JCVD Van Damage
Birth name	Jean-Claude Camille François Van Varenberg
Birth date	October 18, 1960
Birth place	Berchem-Sainte-Agathe, Brussels, Belgium
Nationality	Belgian
Years active	1976–1982 (martial arts)
height
weight	(currently) (fighting weight)
style	Kickboxing, Muay Thai, Shotokan Karate, Taekwondo
rank	''black belt in Shotokan''
trainer	Claude Goetz Dominique Valera
kickbox win	5
kickbox kowin	5
kickbox loss	0
am win	26
am loss	4
updated	}}

Kickboxing and Full-Contact Matches

Van Damme has five matches which were fought under kickboxing or full-contact rules.

In 1976, he over-came being staggered to knockout Toon Van Oostrum in one round.

In 1979, on his second day in Tampa, Florida, Jean-Claude faced Sherman Bergman, a kickboxer from Florida, USA. Van Damme was knocked to the canvas after absorbing a powerful left hook. However, Jean-Claude climbed off the canvas and with an ax-kick, knocked Bergman out in 56 seconds of the first round.

In 1980, after knocking out Georges Verlugels in two rounds, Jean-Claude caught the attention of the European martial arts community. ''Professional Karate Magazine'' publisher and editor Mike Anderson, and multiple European champion Geet Lemmens, tabbed Jean-Claude Van Damme as an upcoming prospect. However, Jean-Claude's ambitions now focused in the direction of acting.

Van Damme made a comeback in 1981. In his first match he knocked out Henk Besselman of Holland in one round, and at the 1st Journée Des Arts Martiaux. Next, Van Damme knocked out Lenny Leikman in 3 rounds.

Van Damme will make a return to fighting and is scheduled to fight former boxing Olympic gold-medalist Somluck Kamsing in November 2011. Early reports have named Las Vegas, USA, Moscow, Russia and Macau, China as locations for the bout but it now seems that the fight will take place at the Rajamangala National Stadium in Bangkok, Thailand. At the prospect of being the first man over the age of 50 to kickbox professionally, Van Damme stated that "it's kind of dangerous, but life is short." The fight is postponed to 2012.

Hollywood

In 1982, Van Damme and childhood friend, Michel Qissi, moved to America in the hope of becoming action stars. They both were cast as extras in the film, ''Breakin'''. After a small part in ''Missing In Action'', Van Damme was next cast in the film ''No Retreat, No Surrender'', as the role of the villain, Ivan the Russian. Van Damme worked for director John McTiernan for the 1987 film ''Predator'' as the titular alien, before being removed and replaced by Kevin Peter Hall. His breakout film was ''Bloodsport'', based on the alleged true story of Frank Dux. Shot on a 1.5 million dollar budget, it became a U.S. box-office hit in the spring of 1988. He then starred in the smaller budgeted film ''Cyborg''. His last role for 1989 was Kurt Sloane in the successful ''Kickboxer''. In this film, his character fought to avenge his brother who had been paralyzed by a Thai kickboxing champion (Qissi).

''Double Impact'' featured Van Damme in the dual role of Alex and Chad Wagner, two brothers fighting to avenge the deaths of their parents. This film reunited him with his former ''Bloodsport'' co-star, Bolo Yeung. He then starred opposite Dolph Lundgren in the action film ''Universal Soldier''. While it grossed $36,299,898 in the U.S., it was an even bigger success overseas, making over $65 million, well over its modest $23 million budget, making it Van Damme's highest grossing film at the time.

Van Damme followed ''Nowhere To Run'' and ''Hard Target'' with ''Timecop'' in 1994. The film was a huge success, grossing over $100 million worldwide. In the film, Van Damme played a time traveling cop, who tries to prevent the death of his wife. It remains his highest grossing film to date.

After his role in the poorly received ''Street Fighter,'' his projects started to fail at the box office. ''The Quest'' (1996), which he directed; ''Maximum Risk'' (1996) and ''Double Team'' (1997) were box-office flops.

The 1999 film ''Universal Soldier: The Return'' which was also a box-office flop, and Van Damme's last theatrically released film until 2008. In 2003, Van Damme employed his dancing training in the music video for Bob Sinclar's ''Kiss My Eyes''.

He returned to mainstream with limited theatrical release of the critically acclaimed film ''JCVD'' in 2008. ''Time'' magazine named Van Damme's performance in the film the second best of the year (after Heath Ledger's The Joker in ''The Dark Knight''), having previously stated that Van Damme "deserves not a black belt, but an Oscar". Van Damme indicated while promoting the film, he experienced a period of homelessness "sleeping on the street and starving in L.A."

Van Damme reprised his role as Luc Deveraux in the 2009 film ''Universal Soldier: Regeneration''.

He was offered a lead role in Sylvester Stallone's latest film ''The Expendables''. Stallone called Van Damme personally to offer him the role, but Van Damme turned it down. He has a series of film projects scheduled for 2011, including another ''Universal Soldier'' movie which will appear between 2011 and 2012, and the role of a villain in the sequel to ''The Expendables''. On June 30, 2011, Van Damme confirmed his participation in ''The Expendables 2''.

In 2011, Van Damme participated in various commercials for Coors Light beer, in which he is located on a snow-covered mountain, wearing a sleeveless denim jacket. Also in 2011 he appears in commercials for washing powder "Dash".

Personal life

At the age of 16 he took up ballet, which he studied for five years. According to Van Damme, ballet "is an art, but it's also one of the most difficult sports. If you can survive a ballet workout, you can survive a workout in any other sport." In the French-speaking world, Van Damme is well known for the picturesque aphorisms that he delivers on a wide range of topics (personal well-being, the environment, etc.) in a sort of Zen franglais. Most famous and often quoted was his repeated use of the English word ''aware'' during an interview for a French channel, to convey the notion of self-awareness as a key to success.

He is training for his upcoming fight with cage fighters Chris 'Ball-Breaker' Banister, Jules 'Crown Jewels' Fox and the champion Paul 'Pistol-Fists' Shah in his home country Belgium.

Van Damme has been married five times, including two marriages with bodybuilder and fitness competitor Gladys Portugues. Van Damme is the father of three children: Kristopher Van Varenberg (born 1987), Bianca (born 1990), and Nicholas (born 1995).

Health and addiction

Van Damme had troubles with cocaine that started during 1995. He entered a month-long rehabilitation program in 1996 but left it after only one week. In 1996, he spent up to $10,000 a week on cocaine. He is also reported to have experienced bipolar disorder. A turning point in his health issues came in late 1997, after having signed divorce papers charging him with spousal abuse, and drug addiction.

After the filming of the 1998 film ''Knock Off'', Van Damme was diagnosed with rapid cycling bipolar disorder after becoming suicidal and started treatment on the mood stabilizer, sodium valproate.

Fight Record Controversy

When Jean-Claude Van Damme became an action film star, there were many doubts as to his claims of a fight record. According to Howard Hanson, President of the World Karate Association, he found evidence of Jean-Claude Van Damme competing in only one amateur bout. Writers from Black Belt Magazine labeled him (Van Damme) a "complete fraud."

On the 12th of November, 1993, the syndicated tabloid show Inside Edition implied that the star's karate credentials were bogus. Van Damme's office supplied a list of four European karate trophies that he earned under his real name, Van Varenberg, between 1978 and 1981: the Hope Cup; the Cup of Antwerp; World Championship, WAKO; and the Gala International. George Anderson, president of the Pan-American Union of Karatedo Organizations, said, "They're all minor awards, but that Van Damme's only crime is hyping them too much. ''Nobody has really clearly proven him to be a liar,''" Anderson says.

Van Damme's lawyer, Martin Singer, made a public statement defending his client: "There are records to document his martial-arts acclaim. He's the one who does those splits on chairs. He doesn't have a stunt man do that."

However, with the internet, photos and videos disproved the view that Van Damme was a fake or fraud. Numerous photos on-line, showed his various matches with such credited fighters as Patrick Teugels, Michael J. Heming and Sherman Bergman.

With the announcement that Van Damme was going to return to fight competition after decades of retirement, and meet Thailand's Somluck Kamsing, his fight record was again attacked as being "hyped".

Van Damme's record is posted on the net as 20-2 (20 knockouts). Paul Maslak of the STAR System World Kickboxing Ratings researched this record and came up with facts that showed that most of these fights were really semi-contact matches. However, photos and newspaper reports have also supported that Van Damme indeed had full-contact/kick-boxing matches.

Semi-Contact Karate and Tournament Competition

At the age of 11, Van Damme joined the ''Centre National De Karaté'' (National Center of Karate) under the guidance of Claude Goetz in France. Van Damme trained for four years and he earned a spot on the Belgian Karate Team.

In 1976, Jean-Claude is reported to have started his competive career in Ingelmunster, Belgium in a semi-contact match which was sanctioned by the European Karate Union. He defeated fellow Belgium Roland Vedani.

The following year, Van Damme remained undefeated with victories over Maurice Devos, Andre LeMaire and fellow team-mate Patrick Teugels in non-tournament matches sanctioned by the World All-Styles Karate Organization. In his first tournament competition, Van Damme placed second at the Challenge Coupe des Espoirs Karate Tournament (1st Trials). Jean-Claude defeated 25 opponents in the three day tournament (including Eric "Bruno" Strauss, Michel Juvillier, and Orlando Lang) before losing in the finals to fellow team-mate Angelo Spataro. In 1978, Van Damme fought Patrick Teugels in a bid for the Belguim Sem-Contact Leightweight Title. However, the more experienced Teugels won the decision in 2-rounds. Next, Van Damme failed to place at the WAKO World Championships, losing in the opening match.

Van Damme travelled with the Belgium Team to Tampa, Florida in the United States in November 1979. Van Damme earned the berth on the team by defeating Andre Robaeys, Jacques Piniarski and Rolf Risberg. In Tampa, Van Damme lost his first semi-contact match and is eliminated from placing in the WAKO World Championships for the second consecutive year. Promoter Mike Anderson recalled Van Damme as a "flashy fighter" at the championships.

Upon his return to Europe, Jean-Claude was a member of the Belgium Team when it won the European Championship on the 26th of December, 1979 at La Coupe Francois Persoons Karate Tournament in Brussels, Belgium. Van Damme defeated British and European Middleweight Champion Michael J. Heming in the finals; enabling his team to take the championship.

'''Jean-Claude Van Damme'' ended his semi-contact career on the 8th of March, 1980 at the Forest National in Brussels. Van Damme knocked Patrick Teugels down and scored a first round technical knockout victory. Teugels suffered a nose injury and was unable to continue. Newspaper reports list the fight as a "light-contact" match which is awarded to Van Damme by "L'abandon" (forfeit) after Teugels is unable to continue.

Filmography

Van Damme has been cast in "dual roles" in a single film many times during his career. Most cases involve two distinct characters, but others (such as ''Timecop'') involve the same character from different periods of time-travel. These scenes often necessitate special editing or blue-screen cinematography to have two versions of the actor interacting in the same scene.

TV

Tournament Record

|- style="margin:0.5em auto; font-size:100%;"

Result	Record	Opponent	Method	Date	Round	Time	Event	Location	Notes
style="text-align:center;" Win								Brussels, Belgium	Light-Contact (Teugels suffers a broken nose and is unable to continue.)
style="text-align:center;" Win								Brussels, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Brussels, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Brussels, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Brussels, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Woluwe, Brussels, Belgium	Semi Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Brussels, Belgium	Semi-Contact (Dias suffers ankle injury and is unable to continue.)
style="text-align:center;" Win								Ingelmunster, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Opprebais, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Mulhouse, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Loss								Arena Deurne, Antwerp, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Loss								Brussels, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Izegem, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Izegem, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Loss								Antwerp, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Antwerp, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Antwerp, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Antwerp, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Antwerp, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Antwerp, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Antwerp, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Antwerp, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Antwerp, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Izegem, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Loss								Izegem, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Antwerp, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Antwerp, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Antwerp, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Antwerp, Belgium	Semi-Contact
style="text-align:center;" Win								Ingelmunster, Belgium	Semi-Contact

Kickboxing Record

|- style="margin:0.5em auto; font-size:100%;"

Result	Record	Opponent	Method	Date	Round	Time	Event	Location	Notes
								Bangkok, Thailand	Kickboxing
style="text-align:center;" Win								Brussels, Belgium	Kickboxing
style="text-align:center;" Win								Brussels, Belgium	Kickboxing
style="text-align:center;" Win								Brussels, Belgium	Kickboxing
style="text-align:center;" Win									Kickboxing (Non-Tournament match. Van Damme climbs off floor to win.)
style="text-align:center;" Win								Brussels, Belgium	Kickboxing

References

Further reading

(Wako) (PKA World Heavyweight Title) (Eku)

External links

Sites

Official Page on Facebook

Rodin Entertainment

Fansite

Interviews

Interview with Patri(c)k Teugels

Category:1960 births Category:Living people Category:People from Sint-Agatha-Berchem Category:Belgian expatriates in the United States Category:Belgian film actors Category:Belgian emigrants to the United States Category:Belgian karateka Category:Belgian kickboxers Category:Middleweight kickboxers Category:Belgian Muay Thai practitioners Category:People with bipolar disorder

ar:جين كلود فان دام az:Jan-Klod Van Damm be:Жан-Клод Ван Дам be-x-old:Жан-Клёд Ван Дам bg:Жан-Клод Ван Дам ca:Jean-Claude Van Damme cs:Jean-Claude van Damme da:Jean-Claude Van Damme de:Jean-Claude Van Damme et:Jean-Claude Van Damme el:Ζαν Κλοντ Βαν Νταμ es:Jean-Claude Van Damme eo:Jean-Claude Van Damme eu:Jean-Claude Van Damme fa:ژان کلود ون دم fr:Jean-Claude Van Damme ga:Jean-Claude Van Damme gd:Jean-Claude Van Damme gl:Jean Claude Van Damme ko:장클로드 반 담 hy:Ժան-Կլոդ Վան Դամ hr:Jean-Claude Van Damme id:Jean Claude Van Damme it:Jean-Claude Van Damme he:ז'אן-קלוד ואן דאם lv:Žans Klods van Damme lt:Jean-Claude Van Damme hu:Jean-Claude Van Damme ml:ജീൻ ക്ലോദ് വാൻ ഡാമെ mn:Жан-Клод Ван Дамм nl:Jean-Claude Van Damme ja:ジャン＝クロード・ヴァン・ダム no:Jean-Claude van Damme pl:Jean-Claude Van Damme pt:Jean-Claude Van Damme ro:Jean-Claude Van Damme ru:Ван Дамм, Жан-Клод sk:Jean-Claude van Damme srn:Jean-Claude Van Damme sr:Жан Клод Ван Дам fi:Jean-Claude Van Damme sv:Jean-Claude Van Damme ta:ஜான் குளோட் வான் டாம் th:ฌอง-โกล็ด วอง ดัม tr:Jean-Claude Van Damme uk:Жан Клод Ван Дам zh:尚-克勞德·范·戴姆

name	Bronski Beat
background	group_or_band
origin	United Kingdom
genre	SynthpopHi-NRGNew Wave Dance rock
years active	1983–1995
label	London Records
associated acts	The Communards
current members	Steve BronskiLarry SteinbachekJonathan Hellyer
past members	Jimmy SomervilleJohn Foster
notable instruments	}}

Bronski Beat were a popular British synthpop trio who achieved success in the mid 1980s, particularly with the 1984 chart hit "Smalltown Boy". All members of the group were openly homosexual and their songs reflected this, often containing political commentary on gay-related issues. Although many groups in the early to mid-80s had an openly gay image, Bronski Beat was one of the first groups to address the issues of gay people. At the height of their popularity the band consisted of singer Jimmy Somerville backed by Steve Bronski and Larry Steinbachek, both of whom played keyboards and percussion. Somerville went on to have success as lead singer of The Communards and as a solo artist.

History

Early years (1983–1985)

Bronski Beat formed in 1983 when Somerville, Steinbachek and Bronski shared a three-bedroom flat in Lancaster House in Brixton, southwest London.

Bronski Beat signed a recording contract with London Records in 1984 after doing only nine live gigs. The band's debut single, "Smalltown Boy", the tale of a boy who was cast away by his family for being homosexual, was a hit, peaking at #3 in the UK Singles Chart. The single was accompanied by a promotional video directed by Bernard Rose, showing Somerville eagerly trying to make friends at a swimming pool, then being attacked by an anti-homosexual gang, being returned to his family by the police and having to leave home. (The police officer was played by Colin Bell, then the marketing manager of London Records). "Smalltown Boy" reached #48 in the U.S. chart and peaked at #7 in Australia. The single featured vocals from session singer Kevin Glancy who would later be tried for fraud, before re-inventing himself as a Christian singer.

The follow-up single, "Why?", while focusing on a Hi-NRG musical formula, was more lyrically focused on anti-homosexual prejudice. It also achieved Top 10 status in the UK, reaching #6, ! width="35"| AUT ! width="35"| NZ ! width="35"| SWE ! width="35"| SWI ! width="35"| US |- ! scope="row"| ''The Age of Consent'' |

Release date: December 1984

Label: London Records

Formats: CD, vinyl, Cassette

| 4 | — | 5 | 41 | 7 | 36 | align="left"| UK: Platinum |- ! scope="row"| ''Truthdare Doubledare'' |

Release date: 1986

Label: London Records

Formats: CD, cassette

| 18 | 20 | 35 | — | 9 | 147 | |- ! scope="row"| ''Rainbow Nation'' |

Release date: February 14, 1995

Label: ZXY Music

Formats: CD, cassette

| — | — | — | — | — | — | |- | colspan="10" style="font-size:8pt"| "—" denotes releases that did not chart |- |}

Remix albums

Title	Details	Peak positions	! rowspan="2" style="width:8em;"
		! width="50"
! scope="row"		* Release date: 1985	PolyGram Records>PolyGram International	* Formats: CD, cassette	24		* UK: Silver

Compilations

''The Singles Collection 1984 / 1990'' (incl. Jimmy Somerville, Bronski Beat & The Communards), 1990 UK#4

''The Very Best Of Jimmy Somerville, Bronski Beat & The Communards'', 2002

''For a Friend: The Best of Bronski Beat, The Communards & Jimmy Somerville'', 2009

Singles

"Smalltown Boy", UK #3, NL #1, US Dance Chart #1, IRL #4, IT #3, US Hot 100 #48

"Why?", September, 1984, UK #6, NL #2, IRL #6, IT #18

"It Ain't Necessarily So", December, 1984, UK #16, NL #32, IRL #26, IT #28

"I Feel Love" (medley with Marc Almond), April, 1985, UK #3, NL #17, IRL #3

"Hit That Perfect Beat", December, 1985, UK #3, NL #16, IRL #5, IT #9

"C'mon C'mon", March, 1986, UK #20, IRL #9, IT #40

"Cha Cha Heels" (with Eartha Kitt), 1989, UK #32, IRL #22

"I'm Gonna Run Away", 1990

"One More Chance" 1990

"What More Can I Say", 1990

"Smalltown Boy" (remix), 1991, UK 32

"Why 94" 1994

"Smalltown Boy 94", 1994

"Kicking Up The Rain" 1995

"I Luv The Nightlife / Hit That Perfect Beat Boy '95"

References

graduation singles from the Bristling Badger blog, Tuesday, 25 July 2006. Accessed 30 March 2007

http://www.stereosociety.com/hundreds.html

External links

Category:British dance music groups Category:British electronic music groups Category:British pop music groups Category:Hi-NRG groups Category:LGBT-themed musical groups Category:Musical groups established in 1983 Category:Musical groups disestablished in 1995 Category:British New Wave musical groups Category:Synthpop groups

cs:Bronski Beat da:Bronski Beat de:Bronski Beat es:Bronski Beat fr:Bronski Beat it:Bronski Beat he:ברונסקי ביט nl:Bronski Beat no:Bronski Beat pl:Bronski Beat pt:Bronski Beat ru:Bronski Beat fi:Bronski Beat sv:Bronski Beat

name	Felicia Day
birth name	Kathryn Felicia Day
birth date	June 28, 1977
birth place	Huntsville, Alabama, United States
residence	Los Angeles, California
nationality	American
occupation	Actress
website	http://www.feliciaday.com/
yearsactive	2001-present }}

Kathryn Felicia Day (born on June 28, 1977 in Huntsville, Alabama) is an American actress, known for her work as "Vi" on the TV series ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer'' and for parts in movies such as ''Bring It On Again'' and ''June'', as well as the Internet musical, ''Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog''. Day is also the star, script writer and producer of the original web series ''The Guild'', a show loosely based on her life as a gamer, which is directed by Sean Michael Becker. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Academy of Web Television.

Personal life and education

Day began her acting career at the age of 7 when she starred as Scout in a local production of ''To Kill a Mockingbird''. She studied operatic singing and ballet professionally, performing at concerts and competitions nationwide. Home-schooled throughout much of her childhood, she began college at the age of 16. An accomplished violinist, Day was accepted to the Juilliard School of Music but chose to attend the University of Texas at Austin on a full scholarship in violin performance. She double majored in mathematics and music performance. Day was a National Merit Scholar (1995) and graduated as valedictorian of her class.

She is an avid player of a wide variety of video game genres. Much of her work on ''The Guild'' web series was based on her personal experience with video games.

Career

Early career

After graduation, Day moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting. She landed several roles in various short and independent films, as well as commercials and guest spots on television shows, including ''Undeclared'' and ''Maybe It's Me''. These parts propelled her to larger roles: a part in the film ''Bring It On Again'', the starring role in ''June'', and a recurring guest spot as potential Slayer Vi on television's ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer'', a recurring role that is still occasionally utilized in that show's eighth season comic book series.

''The Guild''

Day is the creator, writer, and star of ''The Guild'', a web series which started airing its fifth season in July 2011. The first season was primarily hosted on YouTube where it garnered millions of views. Its second season premiered on Microsoft's three major video channels Xbox Live, MSN Video and The Zune Marketplace after Microsoft made a deal with ''The Guild'', allowing Day, her cast, and her crew to receive financial remuneration for their work. Day also created a song and music video called "(Do You Wanna Date My) Avatar", featuring the cast dressed up as their in-game personae. The final moments of the music video itself also detailed that the release date for the 3rd season of Day's ''The Guild'' would be August 25, 2009. A second song and video "Game On" was released previous to the premiere of the 4th season of ''The Guild''.

''The Guild'' has won multiple awards, including the Greenlight Award for Best Original Digital Series Production at the South by Southwest festivals, the YouTube Video Award for Best Series, the Yahoo! Video Award for Best Series, and 2009 Streamy Awards for Best Comedy Web Series, Best Female Actor in a Comedy Web Series, and Best Ensemble Cast in a Web Series.

Other work

In July 2008, Day starred as Penny in the three-part web based musical ''Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog'' (created by Joss Whedon, who also created ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer''). Day was featured as a patient in the episode "Not Cancer" of the medical drama ''House'', and had a guest starring role in the sci-fi drama ''Dollhouse'''s unaired episode "Epitaph One", as well as its series finale "Epitaph Two." In 2008, Day was featured in a series of commercials for Sears. She also appeared in the first of the revitalized Cheetos commercials. In the series ''Lie to Me'', on the episode called "Tractor Man", airing December 14, 2009, Day sang a song called "White Lie" alongside Brendan Hines. Day starred in the Syfy film adaption of the saga Red Riding Hood, called ''Red''; it was produced by Angela Mancuso.

Day also starred in ''Guild'' co-star Sandeep Parikh's web-series ''The Legend of Neil'', in which she portrayed a Fairy. She sings in the second season musical episode, in which she obliquely references her history of internet musicals.

Day lent her voice as Veronica Santangelo in ''Fallout: New Vegas''.

In February 2011, Day announced that she would be starring in a new web miniseries. Called ''Dragon Age: Redemption'', it is based on the Dragon Age videogames made by Bioware. It is due to air in Summer 2011.

Awards

In September 2008, ''TV Week'' included her in their list of Top 10 Web Video Creators.

During the inaugural Streamy Awards held in Los Angeles on March 28, 2009, Day received the award for the "Best Female Actor in a Comedy" for her work as protagonist Cyd Sherman in ''The Guild,'' and won the same award again in 2010. She was also recognized for her work on ''Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog'' in 2009.

Filmography

''Strings'' ''They Shoot Divas, Don't They?'' ''Backslide'' ''The Mortician's Hobby'' ''Mystery Woman ''God's Waiting List'' ''Splitting Hairs'' ''Prairie Fever''Red: Werewolf Hunter ''Rock Jocks''

Year !! Title !! Role !! Notes
2000	''Delusional''	???
2001	|	???	unknown part
rowspan="2"	2002	|	Call Girl	TV movie/Supporting Lead
''House Blend''	Pam
2003	|	Maddie
rowspan="4"	2004	|	Tiffany
''Bring It On Again''	Penelope
''June''	June Marie Jacobs
''Final Sale''	Felicia
rowspan="3"	2005	Mystery Woman: Vision of a Murder''||	Emily	TV movie/Lead
''Warm Springs (film)	Warm Springs''	Eloise Hutchinson
''Short Story Time''	Felicia
2006	|	Trixie
2007	|	Sugar Girl
rowspan="2"	2008	|	Blue
''Dear Me''	Pipsy
2010	|	Virginia Sullivan	Lead
2011	|	???	???

TV series/Internet productions

''Maybe It's Me (TV series) ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series) ''One on One (TV series) ''Monk (TV series) ''Windfall (TV series) ''The Guild ''House (TV series) ''Roommates (TV series) ''The Webventures of Justin & Alden'' ''Dragon Age: Redemption''

Year !! Title !! Role !! Notes
2001	Emeril (2001 TV series)>Emeril''	Cherie
2002	Maybe It's Me''||	Cookie
rowspan="3"	2003	Buffy the Vampire Slayer''||	Vi (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)>Vi	8 episodes
''For the People''	Nicole
''Century City''	Sheryl
rowspan="2"	2004	One on One''||	Sarah
''Strong Medicine''	Jesse's Friend
2005	Monk''||	Heidi Gefsky	"Mr. Monk Gets Drunk" / 1 episode
rowspan="2"	2006	Windfall''||	Danielle	2 episodes
''Love, Inc. (TV series)	Love, Inc.''	Natalie
2007	The Guild - Season 1''||	Cyd Sherman/Codex	YouTube production / All episodes
rowspan="4"	2008	House''||	Apple	"Not Cancer" / 1 episode
''The Legend of Neil''	Fairy
''Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog''	Penny
''The Guild	The Guild - Season 2''	Cyd Sherman/Codex
rowspan="8"	2009	Roommates''||	Alyssa	3 episodes
''My Boys''	Heather
''Dollhouse (TV series)	Dollhouse''	Mag
''The Guild	The Guild - Season 3''	Cyd Sherman/Codex
''IRrelevant Astronomy''	Felicia Day
''Lie To Me''	Ms. Angela
''The Legend of Neil	The Legend of Neil - Season 2''	The Fairy
''Three Rivers (TV series)	Three Rivers''	Jeni
rowspan="4"	2010	|	Herself
''The Guild	The Guild - Season 4''	Cyd Sherman/Codex
''The Legend of Neil	The Legend of Neil - Season 3''	The Fairy
''Generator Rex''	Annie
rowspan="5"	2011	|	Tallis
''Eureka (TV series)	Eureka''	Dr. Holly Marten
''Generator Rex''	Annie
''The Guild	The Guild - Season 5''	Cyd Sherman/Codex
''The Big Chew''	Marjorie

Video games

! Year	! Title	! Role	! Other notes
	''Rock of the Dead''	Mary Beth	game character voice over
''Fallout: New Vegas''	Veronica Santangelo	game character voice over
2011 (expected)	''Guild Wars 2''	Zojja	game character voice over (Still in development as of April 2011)

References

;Further Reading

Schramm, Mike. (Aug. 24, 2009) BlizzCon 2009: WoW.com interviews Felicia Day. (part 2)

External links

Felicia Day Online - official website and blog

Category:1979 births Category:American film actors Category:American television actors Category:Living people Category:People from Huntsville, Alabama Category:Military brats Category:Actors from Alabama Category:American female singers

cs:Felicia Day de:Felicia Day es:Felicia Day fr:Felicia Day it:Felicia Day nl:Felicia Day pt:Felicia Day ru:Дэй, Фелиция sk:Felicia Dayová sv:Felicia Day tr:Felicia Day

name	Michio Kaku
birth date	January 24, 1947
birth place	San Jose, California, United States
residence	New York City, New York, United States
nationality	American
field	Theoretical physics
work institutions	City University of New YorkNew York UniversityInstitute for Advanced Study
alma mater	Harvard University (B.S., 1968)University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D.,1972)
doctoral advisor	Stanley Mandelstam
known for	String field theory, Popular science
footnotes	}}

is an American theoretical physicist, the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York of City University of New York, the co-founder of string field theory, and a "communicator" and "popularizer" of science. He has written several books on physics and related topics, he has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film, and he writes extensive online blogs and articles.

Early life and education

Kaku was born in San Jose, California to Japanese immigrant parents. His grandfather came to the United States to take part in the clean-up operation after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. His father was born in California but was educated in Japan and spoke little English. Both his parents were put in the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, where they met and where his two brothers were born.

At Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, Kaku assembled an atom smasher in his parent's garage for a science fair project. At the National Science Fair in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he attracted the attention of physicist Edward Teller, who took Kaku as a protégé, awarding him the Hertz Engineering Scholarship. Kaku graduated ''summa cum laude'' from Harvard University in 1968 and was first in his physics class. He attended the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and received a Ph.D. in 1972, and in 1972 he held a lectureship at Princeton University.

During the Vietnam War, Kaku completed his U.S. Army basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia and his advanced infantry training at Fort Lewis, Washington. However, the Vietnam War ended before he was deployed as an infantryman.

Academic career

Kaku became a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and New York University. He currently holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York.

Kaku has had over 70 articles published in physics journals such as Physical Review, covering topics such as superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and hadronic physics. In 1974, along with Prof. Keiji Kikkawa of Osaka University, he authored the first papers describing string theory in a field form.

Kaku is the author of several textbooks on string theory and quantum field theory.

Popular science

Kaku is most widely known as a popularizer of science. He has written books and appeared on many television programs as well as film. He also hosts a weekly radio program.

Books

Kaku is the author of various popular science books.

''Physics of the Future''

''Physics of the Impossible''

''Hyperspace''

''Einstein's Cosmos''

''Parallel Worlds''

''Beyond Einstein'' (with Jennifer Thompson)

''Hyperspace'' was a best-seller and was voted one of the best science books of the year by both ''The New York Times'' and ''The Washington Post''. ''Parallel Worlds'' was a finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction in the UK.

Radio

Kaku is the host of the weekly, one-hour radio program ''Explorations'', produced by the Pacifica Foundation's WBAI in New York. "Explorations" is syndicated to community and independent radio stations and makes previous broadcasts available on the program's website. Kaku defines the show as dealing with the general topics of science, war, peace, and the environment.

In April 2006, Kaku began broadcasting ''Science Fantastic'' on 90 commercial radio stations, the only nationally syndicated science program on commercial radio in the United States. It is syndicated by Talk Radio Network and now reaches 130 radio stations and America's Talk on XM. The program is formatted as a live listener call-in show, focusing on "futurology," which he defines as the future of science. Featured guests include Nobel laureates and top researchers on the topics of string theory, time travel, black holes, gene therapy, aging, space travel, artificial intelligence, and SETI. When Kaku is busy filming for television, ''Science Fantastic'' goes on hiatus, sometimes for several months. Kaku is also a frequent guest on many programs, where he is outspoken in all areas and issues he considers of importance, such as the program "Coast to Coast AM," where on 30 November 2007, he reaffirmed his belief that there is a 100% probability of extraterrestrial life in the universe.

Kaku has appeared on ''The Opie and Anthony Show'' a number of times, discussing popular fiction such as ''Back to The Future'', ''Lost,'' and the theories behind time-travel that these and other fictional entertainment focus on. Steven G. Spruill's novel ''The Janus Equation'', which describes the time travel of a post-op transsexual mating with her past self and thereby becoming father and mother to her present self, prompted Dr. Kaku's comment: "Well, you're in deep doo doo if that happens."

Television and film

Kaku has appeared in many forms of media and on many programs and networks, including ''Good Morning America'', ''The Screen Savers'', ''Larry King Live'', ''60 Minutes'', ''Nightline'', ''20/20'', ''Naked Science'', CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, Al Jazeera English, Fox News Channel, The History Channel, ''Conan'', The Science Channel, The Discovery Channel, TLC, ''Countdown with Keith Olbermann'', ''The Colbert Report'', ''The Art Bell Show'' and its successor, ''Coast To Coast AM'', ''BBC World News America'', ''The Opie & Anthony Show'', ''The Covino & Rich Show'', ''Head Rush'', ''The Late Show with David Letterman'', and ''Real Time with Bill Maher.

We Are the Guinea Pigs (1980)

Borders (1989)

''Synthetic Pleasures'' (1995)

Einstein Revealed (1996)

''Future Fantastic'' (1996)

''Stephen Hawking's Universe'' (1997)

Bioperfection: Building a New Human Race (1998)

Exodus Earth (1999)

Me & Isaac Newton (1999)

Space: The Final Junkyard (1999)

''Big Questions'' (2001)

''Parallel Universes'' (2001)

''Horizon'': "Time travel" (2003)

Robo sapiens (2003)

Brilliant Minds: Secret Of The Cosmos (2003)

''Nova'': "The Elegant Universe" (2003)

''Hawking'' (2004)

''The Screen Savers'' (2004)

''Unscrewed with Martin Sargent'' (2004)

''Alien Planet (2005)

''ABC News'' "UFOs: Seeing Is Believing" (2005)

''HARDtalk Extra'' (2005)

''Last Days on Earth'' (2005)

Obsessed & Scientific (2005)

''Horizon'': "Einstein's Unfinished Symphony" (2005)

Prophets of Science Fiction (2006)

''Time'' (2006)

''2057'' (2007)

''The Universe'' (2007)

Futurecar (2007)

''Attack of the Show!'' (2007)

''Visions of the Future'' (2008)

''Horizon'': "The President's Guide to Science" (2008)

Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe (2008)

''Horizon'': "Who's Afraid of a Big Black Hole" (2009–2010)

''Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible'' (2009–2010)

''Horizon'': "What Happened Before the Big Bang?" (2010)

''GameTrailers TV With Geoff Keighley'': "The Science of Games" (2010)

''How the Universe Works'' (2010)

''Through the Wormhole'' (2011)

In 1999, Kaku was one of the scientists profiled in the feature-length film ''Me and Isaac Newton'', directed by Michael Apted. It played theatrically in the United States, was later broadcast on national TV, and won several film awards.

In 2005, Kaku appeared in the short documentary ''Obsessed & Scientific.'' The film is about the possibility of time travel and the people who dream about it. It screened at the Montreal World Film Festival and a feature film expansion is in development talks. Kaku also appeared in the ABC documentary ''UFOs: Seeing Is Believing'', in which he suggested that while he believes it is extremely unlikely that extraterrestrials have ever actually visited Earth, we must keep our minds open to the possible existence of civilizations a million years ahead of us in technology, where entirely new avenues of physics open up. He also discussed the future of interstellar exploration and alien life in the Discovery Channel special ''Alien Planet'' as one of the multiple speakers who co-hosted the show, and Einstein's Theory of Relativity on The History Channel.

In February 2006, Kaku appeared as presenter in the BBC-TV four-part documentary ''Time'' which seeks to explore the mysterious nature of time. Part one of the series concerns personal time, and how we perceive and measure the passing of time. The second in the series deal with cheating time, exploring possibilities of extending the lifespan of organisms. The geological time covered in part three explores the ages of the earth and the sun. Part four covers the topics of cosmological time, the beginning of time and the events that occurred at the instant of the big bang.

On January 28, 2007, Kaku hosted the Discovery Channel series ''2057.'' This three-hour program discussed how medicine, the city, and energy could change over the next 50 years.

In 2008, Kaku hosted the three-hour BBC-TV documentary ''Visions of the Future'', on the future of computers, medicine, and quantum physics, and he appeared in several episodes of the History Channel's ''Universe'' series.

On December 1, 2009, he began hosting a 12-episode weekly TV series for the Science Channel at 10 pm, called ''Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible'', based on his best-selling book. Each 30-minute episode discusses the scientific basis behind imaginative schemes, such as time travel, parallel universes, warp drive, star ships, light sabers, force fields, teleportation, invisibility, death stars, and even superpowers and flying saucers. Each episode includes interviews with the world's top scientists working on prototypes of these technologies, interviews with sci-fi fans, clips from science fiction movies, and special effects and computer graphics. Although these inventions are impossible today, the series discusses when these technologies might become feasible in the future.

In 2010, he began to appear in a series on the website Gametrailers.com called ''Science of Games'', discussing the scientific aspects of various popular video games such as ''Mass Effect 2'' and ''Star Wars: The Force Unleashed''.

Kaku is popular in mainstream media because of his knowledge and his accessible approach to presenting complex subjects in science. While his technical writings are confined to theoretical physics, his public speaking and media appearances cover a broad range of topics, from the Kardashev scale to more esoteric subjects such as wormholes and time travel. In January 2007, Kaku visited Oman. While there, he talked at length to select members of that country's decision makers. In an interview with local media, Dr Kaku elaborated on his vision of mankind's future. Kaku considers climate change and terrorism as serious threats in man's evolution from a Type 0 civilization to Type 1.

On October 11, 2010, Michio Kaku appeared in the BBC program "What Happened Before the Big Bang" (along with Laura Mersini-Houghton, Andrei Linde, Roger Penrose, Lee Smolin, Neil Turok, and other notable cosmologists and physicists), where he propounded his theory of the universe created out of nothing.

Social policy advocacy

Kaku has publicly stated his concerns over matters including the anthropogenic cause of global warming, nuclear armament, nuclear power and the general misuse of science. He was critical of the Cassini–Huygens space probe because of the of plutonium contained in the craft for use by its radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Conscious of the possibility of casualties if the probe's fuel were dispersed into the environment during a malfunction and crash as the probe was making a 'sling-shot' maneuver around earth, Kaku publicly criticized NASA's risk assessment. He has also spoken on the dangers of space junk and called for more and better monitoring. Kaku is generally a vigorous supporter of the exploration of outer space, believing that the ultimate destiny of the human race may lie in extrasolar planets; but he is critical of some of the cost-ineffective missions and methods of NASA.

Kaku credits his anti-nuclear war position to programs he heard on the Pacifica Radio network, during his student years in California. It was during this period that he made the decision to turn away from a career developing the next generation of nuclear weapons in association with Edward Teller and focused on research, teaching, writing and media. Kaku joined with others such as Helen Caldicott, Jonathan Schell, Peace Action and was instrumental in building a global anti-nuclear weapons movement that arose in the 1980s, during the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

Kaku was a board member of Peace Action and on the board of radio station WBAI-FM in New York City where he originated his long running program, ''Explorations,'' that focused on the issues of science, war, peace and the environment.

His remark from an interview in support of SETI, "We could be in the middle of an intergalactic conversation...and we wouldn't even ''know''.", is used in the third Symphony of Science installment "Our Place in the Cosmos".

Personal life

Kaku is married to Shizue Kaku and has one daughter.

Bibliography

References

External links

Getting Physical: Dr. Michio Kaku Explains Einstein's Genius

Russia Takes Aim at Asteroids, op-ed on asteroid defense, Wall St. Journal, Jan. 5, 2010

''The Skeptics' Guide To The Universe'' interview

Michio Kaku on National Public Radio

Category:City College of New York faculty Category:American physicists Category:American radio personalities Category:City University of New York faculty Category:Princeton University faculty Category:Futurologists Category:Harvard University alumni Category:American academics of Japanese descent Category:American people of Japanese descent Category:Japanese-American civil rights activists Category:Pacifica Radio Category:String theorists Category:Theoretical physicists Category:University of California, Berkeley alumni Category:People from San Jose, California Category:1947 births Category:Living people

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