Seventeeth Century: Birth of the Modern Mind | In Person

Course Description:

Author and historian Russell Shorto opined: "A change took place in the middle of the 1600s...in a way more profound than the American and French revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, or the information age, because it underlay all of them and affected the very structure of people's thought—the way they perceived the world, the universe and themselves in it." The shift was philosophical and political, fostering the Scientific Revolution as well as the Thirty Years' War and political revolutions in Britain. What were these intellectual changes and why did they have such vast and profound effects? Join us as we traverse this new worldview and explore the ideas of Descartes, Locke and others as well as the 17th-century wars and revolutions their ideas fostered and supported.