18th-century controversies

novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

' ( , ) is a French satire written by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment, first published in 1759. The novella has been widely translated, with English versions titled Candide: or, All for the Best (1759); Candide: or, The Optimist (1762); and Candide: Optimism''''' (1947). A young man, Candide, lives a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise, being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism by his mentor, Professor Pangloss. This lifestyle is abruptly ended, followed by Candide's slow and painful disillusionment as he witnesses and experiences great hardships in the world. Voltaire

novel by Laurence Sterne

1791 erotic novel by the Marquis de Sade

17th–18th-century dispute among Roman Catholic missionaries

1796 novel by Matthew Lewis

1795 novel by Marquis de Sade

argument between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz over who had first invented calculus

Historical British debate

thumb The Kollyvades () were the members of a movement within the Eastern Orthodox Church that began in the second half of the eighteenth century among the monastic community of Mount Athos, which was concerned with the restoration of traditional practices and opposition to unwarranted innovations, and which turned unexpectedly into a movement of spiritual regeneration. As Metropolitan Kallistos Ware succinctly points out:

The fish-man of Liérganes () is an entity of the mythology of Cantabria, located in the north of Spain. The fish-man would be an amphibian human-looking being, who looked a lot like a metamorphosis of a real human being who was lost at sea. His story was examined by Enlightenment writer Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, who claimed that the story was true.