In The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson introduces many alternative parallels in history. One was to centralize the Age of Enlightenment in Samarkand, India instead of Europe. This is especially evident in Book 4: The Alchemist, with the character K(halid) and the character I(wang) posing various questions about the universe. Enlightenment-period philosophy is also focal in Book 7: The Age of Great Progress, with the character K(erala)'s notion of "no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans, or zamindars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more qadis or mullahs or ulema, no more slavery and no more usury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor..., no more generals, soldiers, armies or navies, no more patriarchy, no more clans, no more caste...." (Robinson 522)


According to Wikipedia:

The Age of Enlightenment (from the German word Aufklärung, meaning "Enlightenment") refers to eighteenth century in European and American philosophy, or the longer period including the seventeenth century and the Age of Reason. It can more narrowly refer to the historical intellectual movement The Enlightenment, which advocated Reason as a means to establishing an authoritative system of aesthetics, ethics, government, and logic, to allow philosophers to obtain objective truth about the universe.

Inspired by the revolution in physics commenced by Newtonian kinematics, Enlightenment thinkers argued that same kind of systematic thinking could apply to all forms of human activity. Hence the Enlightenment is often closely linked with the Scientific Revolution, for both movements emphasized empiricism, reason, science or rationality, but here applied also with natural law to the ethical and governmental spheres in exploration of the individual, society and the state. Its leaders believed they would lead the world into progress from a long period of doubtful tradition, irrationality, superstition, and tyranny which they imputed to the Dark Ages, though not from religious belief. The movement helped create the intellectual framework for the American and French Revolutions, the Latin American independence movement, and the Polish Constitution of May 3; and led to the rise of classical liberalism, democracy, and capitalism.

The Enlightenment is matched with the high baroque and classical eras in music, and the neo-classical period in the arts; it receives modern attention as being one of the central models for many movements in the modern period.

The Enlightenment as a movement solely occurred in Germany, France, Britain, and Spain, but spread beyond. Many of the Founding Fathers of the United States were also heavily influenced by Enlightenment era ideas, particularly in the religious (Deism), economic (the "free market"), and governmental (United States Bill of Rights) spheres.

History of Enlightenment philosophy

Another important movement in the 18th century philosophy, closely related to it, focused on belief and piety. Some of its proponents, such as George Berkeley, attempted to demonstrate rationally the existence of a supreme being. Piety and belief in this period were integral to the exploration of natural philosophy and ethics, in addition to political theories of the age. However, prominent Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and David Hume questioned and attacked the existing institutions of both Church and State. The 19th century also saw a continued rise of empiricist ideas and their application to political economy, government and sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology.

The Enlightenment (if thought of as a short period) was preceded by the Age of Reason or (if thought of as a long period) by the Renaissance and the Reformation. It was followed by Romanticism.

The boundaries of the Enlightenment cover much of the seventeenth century as well, though others term the previous era "The Age of Reason." For the present purposes, these two eras are split; however, it is equally acceptable to think of them conjoined as one long period.

Europe had been ravaged by religious wars; when peace in the political situation had been restored, after the Peace of Westphalia and the English Civil War, an intellectual upheaval overturned the accepted belief that mysticism and revelation are the primary sources of knowledge and wisdom—which was blamed for fomenting political instability. Instead, (according to those that split the two periods), the Age of Reason sought to establish axiomatic philosophy and absolutism as foundations for knowledge and stability. Epistemology, in the writings of Michel de Montaigne and René Descartes, was based on extreme skepticism and inquiry into the nature of "knowledge." The goal of a philosophy based on self-evident axioms reached its height with Baruch (Benedictus de) Spinoza's Ethics, which expounded a pantheistic view of the universe where God and Nature were one. This idea then became central to the Enlightenment from Newton through to Jefferson. The ideas of Pascal, Leibniz, Galileo and other philosophers of the previous period also contributed to and greatly influenced the Enlightenment; for instance, according to E. Cassirer, Leibniz’s treatise On Wisdom "... identified the central concept of the Enlightenment and sketched its theoretical programme" (Cassirer 1979: 121–123). There was a wave of change across European thinking, exemplified by Newton's natural philosophy, which combined mathematics of axiomatic proof with mechanics of physical observation, a coherent system of verifiable predictions, which set the tone for what followed Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in the century after.
(From Wikipedia article "Age of Enlightenment", accessed 2/18/07, GNU Free Documentation License)