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 ...

On Sunday, David Brooks discussed theories of the French and Scottish Enlightenments and their relevance to contemporary American politics. In his definitions, he lumped Edmund Burke with Scottish ...

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 ...

Yale political scientist Ian Shapiro admires Tom Paine, the English-born American revolutionary whose 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense” galvanized support for independence from Great Britain, whose ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...