The examples of Yacob and Amo make it necessary to rethink the Age of Reason
I think this shows how their ideas challenge the usual story that the enlightenment was mainly European. Including thinkers like Yacob and Amo gives a more complete picture of this period.
He believed in the supremacy of reason, and that all humans – male and female – are created equal.
This stood out to me because Yacob was arguing for equality before many European Enlightenment thinkers. This shows that Enlightenment style ideas were developing outside of Europe too.
Historians have begun to think about the Enlightenment in a newly global way
I think this changed the way I thought about the Enlightenment being a European event and now I think it may have been shaped by ideas moving between Europe and Asia.
Some of the ideas in Buddhist philosophy sounded a lot like what I had read in Hume’s Treatise.
This is interesting to me because it suggests that Enlightenment ideas may not have developed only in Europe. Hume's ideas could have been influenced by knowledge from other cultures.