Introduction

The Enlightenment was intended to be an intellectual movement that sought to emancipate human society from what it regarded as the triple tyranny of despotism, bigotry, and superstition (Worster 1994; Coates 1998). Although these seem to be noble ideals, the real trick came in who got to defi ne such concepts. The Rationalist/Materialist tradition established by Bacon, Newton, and Locke asserted that only information provided by measurement and experimentation could provide understanding of phenomena, which implied that science, as defi ned by the Western European intellectual tradition, was the only legitimate interpreter of the natural world.