The radical enlightenments of Benjamin Franklin
By: Douglas Anderson.
Series: New studies in American intellectual and cultural history
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Baltimore, Md
Language: eng
Number of pages: 261
Subjects: Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790 -- Knowledge and learning
Description: In The Radical Enlightenments of Benjamin Franklin Anderson takes a fresh look at the intellectual roots of one of the most engaging and multifaceted of America's founders. Anderson begins by tracing the evolution of young Franklin's theology of works between the letters of Silence Dogood (1722) and his impassioned defense of the heterodox Irish clergyman Samuel Hemphill in 1735.

He places the twenty-five-year production of Poor Richard's Almanac in the context of early eighteenth-century moral and educational psychology. He examines the broad intellectual continuities uniting Franklin's 1726 journal of his return voyage to Philadelphia with successive editions of his Experiments and Observations on Electricity, first published in 1751. And he offers a careful examination of Franklin's seminal, and controversial, 1751 essay "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind."
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.