Steven Pinker’s new best-selling book “Enlightenment Now” has excited the reading public. Bill Gates has called it “my new favorite book of all time.” As he has in previous work, Pinker, like the most ...

The Englightenment is celebrated in the West as an age of progress. It was also an age that cemented some of the worst human traits ...

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

In David Graeber’s slim posthumous book, Pirate Enlightenment: Or the Real Libertalia, the anthropologist argues that 18th-century pirate society inspired and influenced European Enlightenment ...

Is Steven Pinker a modern Enlightenment philosophe? In some ways, the comparison seems reasonable. Like the French philosophes, but unlike most contemporary intellectuals, Pinker writes with ...

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 ...

Just recently, Shoshana Liessmann and Antje Herzog wrote about Immanuel Kant in honor of his 300 th birthday and explained how the celebrated “revolutionary thinker and one of the most prominent ...

The churches relationship to the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment is an entangled history. Margaret Jacobs (“The Enlightenment critique of Christianity,” in The Cambridge History of ...

The Renaissance is conventionally dated from the 14th to the 17th centuries, but the French term “Renaissance” was coined in the 19th. The major events of the “Scientific Revolution” are usually ...

The Enlightenment. By Ritchie Robertson.Allen Lane; 1,008 pages; £40. To be published in America by Harper in February; $45. IN SEPTEMBER THE University of Edinburgh expunged the name of David Hume ...