Until Hume, philosophers had searched for metaphysical foundations supporting our ordinary experience, an omnipotent God or a transcendent reality outside our minds. But Hume undermined all that.

Spinoza revisited Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity1650-1750, by Jonathan I. Israel, Oxford University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-19-820608-9, £30.00 ...

Enlightenment philosophers are famous — or notorious — for championing rationality, so his title's deliberately arresting contrast between flesh and reason immediately reveals that Porter is, ...

The nature of modern-day scientific research can be traced back to proto-Enlightenment philosophers like Descartes, who died in 1650. Just as Descartes—who coined the iconic phrase cogito, ...

In “The Enlightenment’s Most Dangerous Woman,” Andrew Janiak, a professor of philosophy at Duke University, challenges the way Du Châtelet is remembered today.

Hegel’s farrago soon degenerated into “the philosophers’ Enlightenment,” as Ferrone calls it: a set of commonplaces about how Voltaire and the other French philosophes inspired the French revolution—a ...

In “The Enlightenment’s Most Dangerous Woman,” Andrew Janiak, a professor of philosophy at Duke University, challenges the way Du Châtelet is remembered today.

Moral progress was central to the Enlightenment project. Philosophers like Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Comte put forward deterministic models with “iron laws” of historical improvement, suggesting that ...