Dictionary of Philosophy of Religion

(Dana P.) #1
ENLIGHTENMENT

75

Essays (2 vols., 1841, 1844), Poems (1846),
Representative Men (1850), English Traits
(1856), The Conduct of Life (1860), May
Day and other Pieces (1867), Society and
Solitude (1870), and Letters and Social
Aims (1876).


EMOTION. Emotions (e.g., anger, love,
hate, happiness) are sometimes distin-
guished from reason in ethical theory and
thought to be in tension with it, though
more recent works by Robert Solomanson
and others treat emotions as essentially
involving reason. Anger, for example,
involves a person condemning or feeling
rage on the basis of reason, e.g., a belief
that a wronged injury has occurred. In
religious ethics, there is debate over the
voluntariness of emotions (e.g., Is a per-
son responsible for their emotions?), the
relationship of emotions and action (e.g.,
perhaps one can have a duty to engage in
loving action, but it is more problematic
to suppose that a person can have a duty
to feel love as an emotion), and the ethical
status and definition of emotions (e.g.,
what is the difference between love and
lust?).


EMPEDOCLES (c. 490–430 BCE).
Greek, pre-Socratic philosopher who held
that nature itself is constituted by a mix of
love and strife. He is the author of On
the Nature of Things and Hymns of Purifi-
cation. Both works are poems, with sev-
eral hundred lines of each surviving.


EMPIRICISM. A method that gives pri-
macy to experiential and sensory evidence.
While empiricism is chiefly associated
with British philosophers such as John
Locke, George B erkeley, and David Hume,
one can find proto-empiricist dictums
in Roger Bacon that privilege sensory
experience as well.

ENGELS, FRIEDRICH (1820–1895).
German social scientist and philosopher
who, along with Karl Marx, helped
develop communism as a social ideal to
be achieved at the end of a long history of
class conflict. Engels defended a form of
philosophical materialism and atheism as
foundational to his political philosophy.
True emancipation of persons is not to be
found in individualist (bourgeois) acts of
freedom, but in a coordinated commu-
nity with common property. Engels’ chief
works include Herr Eugen Dühring’s Rev-
olution in Science (Anti Dühring) (1878),
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1883),
The Origin of the Family, Private Property,
and the State (1884), Ludwig Feuerbach
and the Outcome of Classical German Phi-
losophy (1888), Principles of Communism
(1919), and Dialectics of Nature (1925).

ENLIGHTENMENT. An intellectual,
cultural, and philosophical movement in
the eighteenth century, which emphasized
human reason and freedom from tradi-
tion, especially religious tradition. Kant
offered as a motto of the Enlightenment:
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