DESCRIPTION:
This title challenges the belief that the 18th century was essentially modern in its temper. Carl Becker demonstrates that the period commonly described as the Age of Reason was, in fact, very far from that; that Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, and Locke were living in a medieval world, and that these philosophers "demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials". In a new foreword, Johnson Kent Wright looks at the book's continuing relevance within the context of current discussion about the Enlightenment.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:
Carl L. Becker (1873-1945), a professor of European history at Cornell University, was one of the world's leading authorities on eighteenth-century thought. Johnson Kent Wright is associate professor in the department of history at Arizona State University and author of A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France: The Political Thought of Mably.

SUBJECT CLASSIFICATIONS:
Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present

SERIES:
Yale Nota Bene

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
Number of Pages: 192
Dewey: 190.9033