Enlightenment represents a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority. Enlightenment’s quintessential idea is that progress is both desirable and attainable.
The Enlightenment was a revolution in how people sought knowledge, by trying not to rely on authority. Mainly Religion. That is the context in which empiricism, purporting to rely solely on the senses for knowledge, played such a salutary historical role, despite being fundamentally false and even authoritative in its conception of how science works.
