methodology employed empiricism, logic, mathematics, reason, and the Mechanical Philosophy of cause and effect to explain the physical world, as opposed to the reliance on unreliable sensory knowledge and religious revelation which had dominated earlier thinking.2 As shall be shown, this empirical methodology was extremely influential to the subsequent Enlightenment thinkers, whose epistemological basis was a belief in the use of inductive knowledge and reason to confront social and existential problems,…
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