Something quite extraordinary happened in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries: the diversified intellectual explosion called the Enlightenment. Philosophers, natural scientists (the divide ...

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 ...

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 ...

CORRECTION: This story was updated on Jan. 21, 2014, to indicate that the Enlightenment occurred from the last decade of the 17th century through the first decade of 19th century. As scientists, we ...

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 ...

The Enlightenment emerges as an eighteenth-century movement characterised by faith in human reason, scepticism towards traditional authority and a commitment to progress across science, politics and ...

The Dream of Enlightenment. By Anthony Gottlieb. Liveright; 301 pages; $27.95. Allen Lane; £20. WESTERN philosophy has had two golden ages. The first was the remarkable explosion of thought in early ...