Before writing Candide, Voltaire went through a lot in his life that probably inspired his seemingly radical views on life, and the rejection of "Optimism-, the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, which sates that the universe is rational. ...
Social and technological change in the seventeenth century brought about the greatest change to a seemingly ordinary concept that everyone experiences everyday- thought. Never before had such an immense change in the thought processes of a mass group of people, quite possibly the world over, occurre...