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The Age of Reason is a philosophical treatise written by the 18th Century British intellectual Thomas Paine, best remembered as the author of the political pamphlet Common Sense, credited with exciting colonial opinion in support of the American Revolutionary War.
The Age of Reason, written in parts during the 1790s and dealing in a systematic examination of organized religion, advocates a skeptical and rational examination of religion known as Deism.
However, it is often ignored that central to this text is an argument in favor of the existence of a Creator, one based on reason and logic as opposed to the various fundamentalist modes of both religion and atheism.
The Age of Enlightenment refers to the 18th century in European philosophy, and is often thought of as part of a larger period which includes the Age of Reason.
Hobbes, whose ideas are a product of the age of reason, systematically pursues and categorizes human emotion, and argues for the need of a rigid system to hold back the chaos of nature in his work Leviathan.
Philosophers such as Michel Foucault are often understood as arguing that the "age of reason" had to construct a vision of "unreason" as being demonic and subhuman, and therefore evil and befouling, whence by analogy to argue that rationalism in the modern period is, likewise, a construction.
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