On Sunday, David Brooks discussed theories of the French and Scottish Enlightenments and their relevance to contemporary American politics. In his definitions, he lumped Edmund Burke with Scottish ...

Before they were internet bogeymen, the thinkers of the Frankfurt School were revolutionary intellectuals grappling with a world that seemed permanently broken. Born out of the failed German ...

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 ...

Most of the precepts are evident today, though there is some speculation embedded as well. Enlightenment thinkers are quick to note that any one particular prediction is unlikely to be reality.

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 ...

If you're a daily coffee drinker, giving it up for a week or even a mere 24 hours is bound to impact your mental clarity and ...

The Age of Enlightenment brought us crucial inventions and discoveries in many areas including the circulation of blood, optics, scientific classification, calculus, the microscope, gravity and more ...

Most people would agree that progress is a good thing, and few would deny that there has been extraordinary progress over the course of human history, or that human existence has improved in ...

Steven Pinker’s new best-selling book “Enlightenment Now” has excited the reading public. Bill Gates has called it “my new favorite book of all time.” As he has in previous work, Pinker, like the most ...