Two Enlightenment authors who had an especially profound impact on the future revolutionaries were Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689 1755), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 78).
"We live in this hyperpartisan world with really smart people on each side," Mr. Hopkins said, invoking John Locke and John Stuart Mill, two enlightenment thinkers who believed in being open to hearing out the other side.
He contends that there were two Enlightenments, one Radical, the other Moderate.
The second time was hundreds of millions of years later, when the cold material condensed into dense nuggets under the influence of gravity, and ignited to become the first stars.Sir Martin Rees, Britain's astronomer royal, named the long interval between these two enlightenments the cosmic "Dark Age".
But there wasn't just one Enlightenment, headquartered in France.
Most people like to multitask, though, even on a voyage of self-discovery, so here, as elsewhere, the most popular book was Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love," in which the reader gets three locales for one low enlightenment.
The language of the hosshin in the form of thing-events may either guide one to enlightenment or deceive one into delusion.
And hopefully it will create a spark or two of enlightenment.
Nontheistic Hinduism and Buddhism include beliefs about an afterlife; in these religious traditions, belief in an afterlife is part of their understanding of cosmic justice, a system in which one's reincarnation (and, ultimately, one's enlightenment and liberation) depends on one's Karma.
Yet to fully understand the brand of philosophie that Voltaire made foundational to the Enlightenment, one needs to recognize that it just as often circulated in fictional stories, satires, poems, pamphlets, and other less obviously philosophical genres.
In other words, one's own striving is the "grace" of the Buddha helping one towards enlightenment.
