Kamille Ward

SLA 201 – WCT II

Maureen Kochanek

February 25th, 2019

Post Salon Individual Assessment

When Immanuel Kant stated, “The motto of the Enlightenment is Dare to Know… have

the courage to use your own intelligence”, it could be interpreted in a few different ways. I think

Kant meant that people need to use their own thoughts instead of following along with what

other people think or believe. He believed that people were lazy and that led to them going along

with what other people thought because they thought that it was easier than expanding their own

knowledge. He also believed that men were cowardly, and they feared to put themselves out

there and expand the knowledge that they had. The church didn’t want the common people to

know more than what they knew, and they believed it was a threat to them, so Kant believed that

they should dare to know the information that they wanted to be intelligent human beings. In my

studies at Seton Hill, I dare to know by trying to learn more about the topic than just the basics. I

am an Exercise Science major, so with the classes that relate to my major especially, I take extra

time and effort into those classics to know more about the things I am learning about.

Denis Diderot was an important factor when it came to dare to know. He created the

Encyclopedia. The Encyclopedia incorporated all of the world’s knowledge and spread the

information all over the world. Thomas Jefferson was a founding father of the United States who

wrote the Declaration of Independence. His work was important because in the Declaration of

Independence stressed ideas such as liberty, fundamental human rights, and equality. All of these
factors helped to contribute to men having the opportunity to learn new things and expand the

knowledge that they had. François-Marie Arouet, also known as Voltaire, was a writer who

dared to know by exposing injustices within the Catholic Church. He promoted concepts of

freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and the separation of church and state. He dared to

know by exposing the catholic church and expressing his own ideas, which was not common

before the Enlightenment period. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was important because he wrote the

book “The Social Contract” in which is promoted a form of government based on small, direct

democracy. A direct democracy would allow men to put forth their own ideas and contribute to

government. Isaac Newton was important in the role of science in the enlightenment. He laid the

foundation for classical mechanics and calculus, and also developed the laws of motion and

universal gravitation. This led to an expansion of knowledge with understanding the universe,

and typically, people were not allowed to question the church on the ideas of the universe.

In the Salon assignment, I found it most difficult to express the ideas that Thomas

Jefferson had, simply because I didn’t necessarily agree with everything that he believed. I

thought it was very interesting to put ourselves in the positions that these people may have been

in during an actual Salon. I like how some people used accents and I think that my group could

have done that better. Some people also made it more personal instead of using as many facts

and we could’ve done this a little bit better too, instead of just listing our beliefs of the people

that we chose. The most important thing that I learned from the Salon was the thoughts that a lot

of Enlightenment thinkers had on specific topics during the enlightenment period. I think that we

all contributed equally to the work throughout the project because we added our own information

that pertained to the person that we selected. I think that I may have been the leader of the group,
simply because I had to assume the roles of both the Host of the Salon, as well as Thomas

Jefferson. Our group was small, so it was easy to distribute the work.