Gabrielle Émilie le Tonnelier-de-Breteuil, known as the Marquise du Châtelet after her marriage at age 18, was a brilliant philosopher in the French Enlightenment, whose reputation has too long been ...

At an exhibition dedicated to him at the Jewish Museum Berlin, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier described the philosopher's legacy as "universal." The Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn ...

This book is about the break-up of the short friendship between David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the response to it by the “republic of letters” in Europe at the time, and what it intimates for ...

CORRECTION: This story was updated on Jan. 21, 2014, to indicate that the Enlightenment occurred from the last decade of the 17th century through the first decade of 19th century. As scientists, we ...

Was the Enlightenment a Good Thing? At first blush, the question sounds almost sacrilegious. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment, after all, taught us to be democratic and to believe in human rights, ...

We commonly assume that anti-Semitism and related attitudes are a product of ignorance and fear, or fanatical beliefs, or some other irrational force. But it is by now well known that some of the most ...