Source: Wikimedia Commons/Johann Gottlieb Becker/Public Domain. In 1783, two years after the publication of his masterpiece, The Critique of Pure Reason, the 59-year-old Immanuel Kant could finally ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Anyone who has studied world history will recall the name of Voltaire, an Enlightenment thinker who paved the way for the French Revolution. This historical figure was also an entrepreneur who ...

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 ...