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Benjamin West

‘The ingenious Captain Peale” sired a dynasty of painters and started America’s first great museum.

We have come a long way from the philosophy of the Enlightenment...a shift that represents a retreat rather than an advance, argues the noted historian.

We think of our own time as an Age of Enlightenment, but it flouts and even repudiates two essential principles of the Enlightenment: first the priority of the claims of science and culture over those of politics, and second the cosmopolitan and even universal nature of science
Benjamin Franklin was the most cosmopolitan spirit of his age.

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