The epilogue focuses on the final writings of Madame Roland, who was guillotined in 1793. Unlike the other writers in “The ...

In 1750, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, French economist and statesman called the previous century the “Age of Reason” because of scientific advances. Turgot was the first economist to have recognized ...

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 ...

Everyone knows that. But treating those limits as moral collapse is an evasion, allowing critics to keep the moral ...

Was the Enlightenment a Good Thing? At first blush, the question sounds almost sacrilegious. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment, after all, taught us to be democratic and to believe in human rights, ...

Setting aside that the Enlightenment did not end violence and self-destruction in the West (see: World War I, fascism, World War II, and the Cold War), calls for enlightenment in the Islamic world ...

Philosophers have long said that animals deserve better from humans. Ashoka (c. 304-232 BCE), a Hindu emperor who converted to Buddhism, wrote about his attempts to refrain from activities that harm ...