For Immanuel Kant, the central theme of the Enlightenment—that great 18th century movement that emphasized the power of reason—was Sapere aude. This is usually translated as "Dare to know" or, more ...

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 ...

The Renaissance is associated with great figures like the father of the Latin revival Petrarch, the humanist philosopher Pico della Mirandola, the great artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci, the poet ...

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 ...

As we kick off the year commemorating the 250th anniversary of the establishment of the United States Army, we’ll reflect on the rich legacy of service, highlighting events that marked periods in our ...

Dr. Bell is a professor of history at Princeton. Will artificial intelligence bring about an intellectual revolution as profound as the Enlightenment? Enthusiasts like to make this claim, and even use ...

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 ...