Summary:
Benjamin Franklin embodied many valued character traits, and the question is raised here whether his ideas were ultimately puritan or more based in enlightenment. Both sides of the case are analyzed.
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American Studies
Oct. 15, 2004
Is Franklin a Puritan or Enlightenment Thinker
About Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin came from a very simple Calvinist background. Ha dad little formal education, but he made it through his own efforts and became a rare genius in human history. Everything seems to meet in this one man, mind and will, talent and art, strength and ease, wit and grace and he became almost everything: a printer, essayist, scientist, statesman, philosopher, political economist, ambassador, etc.-¡°Jack of all trades¡±.
Enlightenment in America
Toward the latter part of the 17th century, a complete new view of the universe came into being. With the publication of Newton¡¯s ¡°Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica¡± in which his laws of motion and the idea of universal gravitation were embodied, the universal became something mechanical, like a clock instead of to the close.....
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