Immanuel Kant's quote encourages people to think independently and trust their own reasoning. Originating from his essay on ...

Defender of the Enlightenment Patrick West on postmodernism and communicative reason. Jürgen Habermas (1929-2026) was a great ...

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 ...

For Immanuel Kant, the central theme of the Enlightenment—that great 18th century movement that emphasized the power of reason—was Sapere aude. This is usually translated as "Dare to know" or, more ...

The twenty-first century has been hard on the Enlightenment. Lauded as a foundational moment in the story of human progress—the font from which all civilized life supposedly sprang—its position and ...

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 ...

The many anti-globalist politicians, parties, and movements roiling the politics of Western liberal democracies can be understood in many ways. But the most fruitful may be to view them as the latest ...

Although the Enlightenment revolutionized human thought and transformed the world, it failed to produce a coherent theory of knowledge. The central reason is that the modernist systems of science and ...

Yoram Hazony goes further than he needs to in arguing that the U.S. Constitution isn’t a product of Enlightenment thinking. Yoram Hazony offers a corrective to blind faith in reason as the solution to ...