Religion and spirituality are important components of several excerpts in this chapter. How does each author present religion, and to what end? What might the relative absence of religion in some of the texts signify?
Why did the Scientific Revolution emerge in western Europe and not in the Middle East or China? What light do the documents included in this chapter shed on this question?
How would you define science? How might each of the authors included in this chapter answer this question?
Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” trans. Peter Gay, in Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 1071–1076.