THE EMPHASIS ON REASON – ITS DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATION – that was so characteristic of medieval Western Europe, and which we have described, must now briefly be viewed in the broader context of subsequent history. It is essential to do this because I have claimed that the Age of Reason began in the Middle Ages. If it did, what connection does the latter have with the former? To make the connection, we must first arrive at some sense of what the phrase “Age of Reason” signifies.

THE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN “AGES OF REASON”

Many rightly regard the seventeenth century as a century of momentous change because it produced a “Scientific Revolution,” an expression that is commonly used to characterize the science of that century. The designation is appropriate because of the contributions of a series of extraordinary figures – Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Christiaan Huyghens, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and many others – who produced scientific theories, experiments, and treatises that reflected a new approach to nature that radically transformed the way science had been done within the earlier context of medieval Aristotelian natural philosophy. Galileo captured a fundamental aspect of the dramatic change when he declared:

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.