Age of Enlightenment Louis XV until the French Revolution. If taken back to the mid-17th century, the Enlightenment would trace its origins to Descartes' "Discourse on the Method", published in 1637. In France, many cited the publication of Isaac Newton's "Principia Mathematica" in 1687. It is argued by several historians and philosophers that the beginning of the Enlightenment is when Descartes shifted the epistemological basis from external authority to internal certainty by his "cogito ergo sum" published in 1637. As to its end, most scholars use the last years of the century, often choosing the French Revolution of 1789 or the beginning of
Cogito and the History of Madness his point of departure for "Cogito and the History of Madness" is Foucault's 1961 book "Folie et déraison". Derrida's paper primarily relies on two sections of Foucault's work, the original 1961 preface in which Foucault makes a number of general comments about the book, setting forth his intentions and methodology, and two and a half pages at the start of the second chapter where Foucault links Descartes to an historical event that silenced madness at the end of the classical age. Foucault's 1961 text was heavily abridged for a popular edition in 1964 that formed the basis for Richard Howard's