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 ...

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 ...

The Enlightenment provides a touchstone for our understanding of modern history and, not least, for our sense of the current moment. More than two centuries ago, a shift in outlook sought to throw off ...

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 Scottish Enlightenment fostered a distinctive fusion of moral philosophy and political economy, centred on figures such as David Hume, Adam Smith and their contemporaries. Moral philosophy ...

Chapter 1: Dare to Understand! Enlightenment, according to Immanuel Kant, is “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity.” It is a dare for us to understand the world around us because if ...

It is not often recognized that, prior to the 17th and 18th centuries, the period which Western history calls the Enlightenment, the concept of race did not exist. It is still less often recognized ...

To think of this book as any kind of scholarly exercise is a category mistake. The purpose of Pinker’s laborious work is to reassure liberals that they are on “the right side of history”. By John Gray ...