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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The academic left did not critique the Enlightenment. It declared it morally tainted and beyond repair. That declaration has become ritualized. It is repeated often enough to feel settled. It is ...

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 ...