Despite their differences, the cold-war superpowers did share certain common Enlightenment roots, which allowed for a sense of clean competition judged by more-or-less common criteria.
According to a common Enlightenment assumption, as humankind clarifies the laws of nature through the advance of natural science and philosophy, the true moral and political order will be revealed with it.
She highlights the similar aspirations, mutual enlightenment and common foibles of monarchs, travellers, philanthropists, writers, musicians, scholars, and exiles.
Though commitment to the political ideals of freedom and equality constitutes a common ground for Enlightenment political philosophy, it is not clear not only how these values have a home in nature as Enlightenment science re-conceives it, but also how concretely to interpret each of these ideals and how properly to balance them against each other.
They will focus on the links between economic arrangements and social outcomes (both domestic and global) and assess social problems and their underlying economic causes with reference to ethical concerns which are common to both enlightenment rationalism and eastern and western religious teaching.
More careful readers noted that what he was looking for was a particularly British expression of the Enlightenment beliefs common to, say, France or the United States, whose catchy slogans ("liberty, equality, fraternity" and "land of the free") he seemed to envy.
Discussing the "Hemoclysm" – the tide of 20th-century mass murder in which he includes the Holocaust – Pinker writes: "There was a common denominator of counter-Enlightenment utopianism behind the ideologies of nazism and communism".
"Two angelic intellects inhabit a common abyss: the post-Enlightenment ever-augmenting inner self, of which Hamlet is a precursor, intervening between Luther and Calvin, and later Descartes and Spinoza".
He used his artistic talents to bring spiritual enlightenment to the common people.
The common narrative is that the Enlightenment started in England and spread to the rest of Europe.
While it is common to conceive of the Enlightenment as supplanting the authority of tradition and religious dogma with the authority of reason, in fact the Enlightenment is characterized by a crisis of authority regarding any belief.
