Abstract
Historians have long rejected Max Weber and D. H. Lawrence's portrayal of Benjamin Franklin as the stuffy architect of a new kind of prudish bourgeois virtue. Recent scholarly work has challenged this notion and has added something more: the idea that Franklin is a serious thinker, even an ironic thinker, in the Western philosophic tradition. Certainly Franklin participated in a vigorous intellectual debate with the greatest minds of his time over the meaning of religion, moral duty, and virtue. In this article I return to Franklin's own writings to provide what I think is a new and hopefully provocative interpretation of Franklin as a philosophic thinker. After briefly recounting the traditional interpretation of Franklin's Autobiography, I present new interpretations of Franklin's metaphysical essays in the context of his orientation to the philosophical schools of his day and argue that Franklin, upon this foundation, constructs his own theory of the philosophical temper.