David Hume, the pre-eminent Enlightenment philosopher, was born in Edinburgh in 1711. There he lived for many years, and there he died, perhaps the most famous Scot in history. It was thus ...

The growing power of the centralized state loomed as the central problem for liberalism in the early nineteenth century, and ...

In Anthony Pagden’s sweeping new study, the Enlightenment constitutes a collective intellectual journey away from God toward a new understanding of man. His account of this journey is bookended by ...

Wherever we look today in academia, scholars are rushing to defend the Enlightenment ideas of political and individual liberty, human rights, faith in scientific reason, secularism, and the freedom of ...

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 ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. What is enlightenment, and where, when and how did it happen? One traditional answer is that the Enlightenment ...

Although the Enlightenment revolutionized human thought and transformed the world, it failed to produce a coherent theory of knowledge. The central reason is that the modernist systems of science and ...

Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World Roy Porter Allen Lane £25, pp752 Buy it at BOL We are still living in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and still pursuing the implications ...