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 ...

Science will never be able to give a completely objective description of the world. That should make us humbler—and wiser.

The Enlightenment provides a touchstone for our understanding of modern history and, not least, for our sense of the current moment. More than two centuries ago, a shift in outlook sought to throw off ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Like all good liberal intellectuals of the last century, Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog spent a great deal of time agonising over the legacy of the Enlightenment. Cuckolded and divorced, Herzog seeks to ...

Jonathan Israel’s epic defense of "Radical Enlightenment" has the dogmatic ring of a profession of faith. By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional ...