Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, also called Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle, was a French author and an influential member of three of the academies of the Institut de France, noted especially for his accessible treatment of scientific topics during the unfolding of the Age of Enlightenment.
A 1723 portrait of Fontenelle by Louis Galloche
Éléments de la géométrie de l'infini, 1727
A portrait of Fontenelle by Nicolas de Largillière
The Age of Enlightenment was the intellectual and philosophical movement that occurred in Europe in the 17th and the 18th centuries. The Enlightenment featured a range of social ideas centered on the value of knowledge learned by way of rationalism and of empiricism and political ideals such as natural law, liberty, and progress, toleration and fraternity, constitutional government and the formal separation of church and state.
Reading of Voltaire's tragedy, The Orphan of China, in the salon of Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin in 1755, by Anicet Charles Gabriel Lemonnier, c. 1812
René Descartes, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science
German philosopher Immanuel Kant, one of the most influential figures of Enlightenment and modern philosophy
Cesare Beccaria, father of classical criminal theory