Based on the Storrs lectures delivered at Yale University A distinguished American historian challenges the belief that 18th century was essentially modern in its temper. In crystalline prose Carl L. Becker demonstrates that the period commonly described as the Age of Reason was, in fact, very far from that. Voltaire, Hume, Diderot & Locke were living in a medieval world. They "demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials." Preface Climates of Opinion The Laws of Nature & of Nature's God The New History: Philosophy Teaching by Example The Uses of Posterity
Author
Carl Lotus Becker was an American historian. He is best known for The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932), four lectures on The Enlightenment delivered at Yale University. His assertion that philosophies, in the "Age of Reason," relied far more upon Christian assumptions than they cared to admit, has been influential, but has also been much attacked, Cornell has recognized his work as an educator by naming one of its five new residential colleges the Carl Becker House.
