Paine would also more than likely have been familiar with Voltaire's mocking wit and the works of other deistic French philosophes.

Rameau appeared revolutionary to the Lullyistes, disturbed by the complex harmony of his music ; and reactionary to the " philosophes ," who only paid attention to its content and who either would not or could not listen to the sound it made.

Many other French philosophes ( intellectuals ) exerted philosophical influence on a continental scale, including Voltaire, Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose essay The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right was a catalyst for governmental and societal reform throughout Europe.

The philosophes used reason to attack superstition, bigotry, and religious fanaticism, which they considered the chief obstacles to free thought and social reform.

According to Peter Gay, building on Ernst Cassirer's much earlier study of the intellectual progenitors of Kant, the Enlightenment was the creation of a small group of thinkers, his family of philosophes or ‘ party of humanity ’, whose coherent anti-Christian, ameliorist, and individualistic programme of reform developed from very specific cultural roots.

The philosophes wrote for a broad educated public of readers who snatched up every Enlightenment book they could find at their local booksellers, even when rulers or churches tried to forbid such works.

The important works of the philosophes belonged to a variety of different genres, such as the tale illustrating a particular philosophical point ;( Zadig ( 1747 ) or Candide ( 1759 ), both by Voltaire in 1759 ); or satire on French life disguised as letters from an exotic country ( Lettres persanes by Montesquieu in 1721 ); or essays ( The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu in 1748, An Essay on Tolerance by Voltaire in 1763 ; The Social Contract by Rousseau in 1762 ; The Supplement to a voyage of Bougainville by Diderot, or The History of the Two Indias by the Abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal ).

Since the 19th century, humanism has been associated with an anti-clericalism inherited from the 18th-century Enlightenment philosophes.

Notwithstanding the meekness and affability of his upright and moderate character, modest to a fault ( he had the classical sculptures in the Vatican provided with mass-produced fig leaves ) and generous with his extensive private fortune, Clement XIII's pontificate was disturbed by perpetual contentions respecting the pressures to suppress the Jesuits coming from the progressive Enlightenment circles of the philosophes in France.

Although philosophe is a French word, the Enlightenment was distinctly cosmopolitan ; philosophes could be found from Philadelphia to St. Petersburg.

A century after his death, Schopenhauer favorably quoted Vauvenargues ' saying: " la clarté est la bonne foi des philosophes " is the good faith of philosophers, from Reflections and Maxims, 729

The philosophes of the Enlightenment used criticism of myth as a vehicle for veiled criticisms of the Bible and the church.

According to Bruce Lincoln, the philosophes " made irrationality the hallmark of myth and constituted philosophy — rather than the Christian kerygma — as the antidote for mythic discourse.

Un dîner de philosophes painted by Jean Huber Voltaire.

During the period of the French Revolution, Rousseau was the most popular of the philosophes among members of the Jacobin Club.

Rousseau was upset that his deistic views were so forcefully condemned, while those of the more atheistic philosophes were ignored.

This was cause enough for the philosophes hatred of their former friend.

In France, Enlightenment 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 cousins.

He was, though a great cultivator of sensibility and unsparingly criticized the rising philosophes.

This position was the standard one in Europe during the 18th century, amongst the Enlightenment philosophes.

In the mid-1750s, Rameau criticised Rousseau's contributions to the musical articles in the Encyclopédie, which led to a quarrel with the leading philosophes d ' Alembert and Diderot.

It is not in virtue of his great age alone that this can be said of him ; he actually had much in common with the beaux esprits of the 17th century, as well as with the philosophes of the 18th.

She founded her own salon, at Étiolles, and was joined by many philosophes, among them Voltaire.

The explicitly atheistic and materialistic The System of Nature presented a core of radical ideas which many contemporaries, both churchmen and philosophes found disturbing, and thus prompted a strong reaction.

It had incredibly negative effects on the rest of the philosophes, in particular, Denis Diderot, and the great work he was doing on the Encyclopedie.

With the Verri brothers, Beccaria traveled to Paris, where he was given a very warm reception by the philosophes.

He was one of the last of the philosophes, and in this character he figures in many memoirs, such as those of Madame de Rémusat.

"" Yim continues, " Whether it was Madame Geoffrin's design to attract all the most eminent foreigners to her salon, thereby spreading the reputation of her home throughout Europe, as Marmontel wrote, or whether this was the natural consequence of the presence of so many philosophes and Encyclopédistes, it was a fact that no foreign minister, no man or woman of note who arrived in Paris failed to call on Madame Geoffrin in the hope of being invited to one of her select dinners.

" It was a forum not for the philosophes and their Republic of Letters, but for the anti-philosophe campaign.

" The salonnières of the Enlightenment were a small number of women who knew and admired one another, lived lives of regularity rather than dissipation, and were committed both to their own education and the philosophes ' project of Enlightenment.

His work should not be compared to Hugo and the Parnassian poets, but to philosophes like André Morellet.

It is commonly believed that double-rhythm shag evolved after these, as the dance spread to the north.

Note that the so-called Kinshasa Highway is not a physical road but a metaphor applied to the route by which AIDS is believed to have been spread east through Uganda and Kenya and neighbouring countries by truck drivers from the Congo.

They believed that everyone in society could benefit from experiencing such power and that if everyone could interact with computers in the way that hackers did, then the hacker ethic might spread through society and computers would improve the world.

He also believed that hypnosis was a " partial sleep " meaning that a generalised inhibition of cortical functioning could be encouraged to spread throughout regions of the brain.

But some have believed that its intentional emphasis on European forms coupled with a Eurocentric philosophy espoused by several of its leading lights hindered its spread elsewhere.

Trotsky believed that the Russian revolution needed to be spread all over the globe's working class, the proletarians for world revolution ; Stalin insisted on consolidating Bolshevism in Russia and industrialization, " socialism in one country.

At the time he felt that the war was a wrongful one and believed that territorial gains were designed to spread slavery throughout the nation, writing in 1883, " I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day, regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.

It is believed that these instruments eventually spread to China, India, the Byzantine Empire and the Middle East, where they developed into instruments such as the erhu in China, the rebab in the Middle East, the lyra in the Byzantine Empire and the esraj in India.

In a lecture delivered on 12 September 2006, Pope Benedict XVI quoted from a dialogue believed to have occurred in 1391 between Manuel II and a Persian scholar and recorded in a book by Manuel II ( Dialogue 7 of Twenty-six Dialogues with a Persian ) in which the Emperor stated: " Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.

She spread stories about his supposed lust for the English throne, and when the Catholic anti-Leicester libel, Leicester's Commonwealth, was published in 1584 Dudley believed that Mary was involved in its conception.

It is believed that the civilization was later devastated by the spread of diseases from Europe, such as smallpox.

Calhoun believed that the spread of slavery into the back country of his own state improved public morals by ridding the countryside of the shiftless poor whites who had once held the region back.

The syllabic nature and dictionary order of the modern kana system of Japanese writing is believed to be descended from the Indic scripts, most likely through the spread of Buddhism.

The pattern of settlement that is believed to have occurred is that the Polynesians spread out from the Samoan Islands into the Tuvaluan atolls, with Tuvalu providing a stepping stone to migration into the Polynesian outlier communities in Melanesia and Micronesia.

The Hippopotamidae are believed to have evolved in Africa, and while at one point the species spread across Asia and Europe, no hippopotami have ever been discovered in the Americas.

While alveolar echinococcosis is not extremely common, it is believed that in the coming years, it will be an emerging or re-emerging disease in certain countries as a result of E. multilocularis ’ ability to spread.

This confidence began to spread from the trenches to the home front and it was said " We believed in Clemenceau rather in the way that our ancestors believed in Joan of Arc.

The origins of the Tangut Chan can be also traced deeper, than it was previously believed: information on Bao-tang Wu-zhu （ 保唐无住720 ～ 794 ） travels in North-Western China from the Notes on Transmitting the Dharma Treasure through Generations implies that at the period of 760's some sort of Buddhism was spread in the region of Helanshan, where the Tangut were already residing.

Messianic Jews believe God's people have a responsibility to spread his name and fame to all nations ( Psalms 96: 3, Ezekiel 3: 18 – 19 ) It is believed that the Children of Israel were, remain, and will continue to be the chosen people of the God, and are central to his plans for existence.

Cato was also opposed to the spread of Hellenic culture, which he believed threatened to destroy the rugged simplicity of the conventional Roman type.

Although the refugees were controlled within Pakistan's largest province, Balochistan under then-martial law ruler General Rahimuddin Khan, the influx of so many refugees – believed to be the largest refugee population in the world – spread into several other regions.

It is believed that many stories, such as the surrender and execution of Crockett, were created and spread in order to discredit Santa Anna and add to his role as villain.

The fourth was wiped out by a wind storm where people turned into monkeys and spread through the hills. After the fourth sun perished, the Aztecs believed that the gods assembled to decide which god was to become the next sun.

That is, O ' Sullivan believed that Providence had given the United States a mission to spread republican democracy (" the great experiment of liberty ").