There’s something about the Enlightenment. Today, few educated men and women spend much time debating whether Western civilization took a disastrously wrong turn in the High Middle Ages. They do not ...

Something quite extraordinary happened in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries: the diversified intellectual explosion called the Enlightenment. Philosophers, natural scientists (the divide ...

Gabrielle Émilie le Tonnelier-de-Breteuil, known as the Marquise du Châtelet after her marriage at age 18, was a brilliant philosopher in the French Enlightenment, whose reputation has too long been ...

In 1769, the Swiss theologian Johann Caspar Lavater publicly challenged Moses Mendelssohn, known throughout Germany to Jew and non-Jew alike as the “German Socrates,” to refute logically ...

This book is about the break-up of the short friendship between David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the response to it by the “republic of letters” in Europe at the time, and what it intimates for ...

A lot of people are selling Enlightenment these days. After the Brexit vote and the election of President Trump, David Brooks published a paean to the “Enlightenment project,” declaring it under ...

To understand the ultimate nature of reality, philosophers could learn more from elephants than traditional armchair ...