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 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 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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In the late 1960s, college students around the world began meditating in search of enlightenment. What if, more than 50 years later, they are finding what they were looking for? What is enlightenment?