Modern Enlightenment and the Rule of Reason

The essays in this volume pose the question common usage has obscured: was the Enlightenment truly enlightened or enlightening? Scholarly investigation has sometimes avoided the question by confining itself to historical particulars of 18th-century Europe. Yet the most visible proponents of the Enlightenment, the philosophers, insisted that their project originated a century earlier, in the writings of the first self-proclaimed modern philosophers. This volume seeks philosophical clarity of modernity's enlightenment by beginning with Bacon, Descartes and Hobbes. Consideration of Pascal, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Roussea, Lessing and Kant - all philosophical critics, or reformers, of the Enlightenment - furthers the study of its legacy by displaying its diversity. Finally, the book indicates the Enlightenment's vitality by outlining ways it continues to hold philosophical sway in this century.