The Renaissance is conventionally dated from the 14th to the 17th centuries, but the French term “Renaissance” was coined in the 19th. The major events of the “Scientific Revolution” are usually ...

Yale political scientist Ian Shapiro admires Tom Paine, the English-born American revolutionary whose 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense” galvanized support for independence from Great Britain, whose ...

Peter Harrison is an Australian Laureate Fellow and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland. His most recent books are The Territories of Science and ...

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 ...

For Steven Pinker, author of the best-selling “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress,” it’s the best of times—and I don’t mean because his book is selling so well.

Everybody is talking, and rightly so, about the big Al Gore piece in Rolling Stone on science, reason, and the climate crisis. And it is, indeed, quite a tour de force. Gore is not only a charismatic ...

Enlightenment is the ultimate goal of human life. It means to bring in the light of the truth. Why do we need to be enlightened? Because we are living in the darkness of ignorance. We believe in lies, ...

Enlightenment. The E word. The state of consciousness all spiritual seekers hope for. And yet wishing for enlightenment is a wonderfully paradoxical experience: craving the state of non-craving, ...