Franklin’s Concept of Reason in The Autobiography

摘要

Written in the form of a letter to his illegitimate son William,Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography remains one of the classics of the genre and the first American book to be taken seriously by Europeans as literature.As a work produced by an enlightened representative under the influence of the American Enlightenment,The Autobiography reflects many elements of this great movement:empiricism,deism,religious tolerance,moral philosophy,economic liberalism,republicanism,revolutionary utopianism,and so forth.However,these disparate elements interact in this work in a way that attempts to redefine the meaning of human reason.