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 ...

Everyone knows that. But treating those limits as moral collapse is an evasion, allowing critics to keep the moral ...

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 ...

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 ...

Among neoconservatives, especially since the Iraq war, French bashing has become quite a popular sport. The French, so the sentiment goes, are appeasers, elitists, cowards and (worst of all) ...

A principled approach to polemics requires that the arguments of an opponent be presented accurately. The fact that you are unable to do this, that you feel compelled to mislead and misrepresent—in ...

We commonly assume that anti-Semitism and related attitudes are a product of ignorance and fear, or fanatical beliefs, or some other irrational force. But it is by now well known that some of the most ...