Ends of Enlightenment explores three realms of eighteenth-century European innovation that remain active in the twenty-first century: the realist novel, philosophical thought, and the physical sciences, especially human anatomy. The European Enlightenment was a state of being, a personal stance, and an orientation to the world. Ways of probing experience and knowledge in the novel and in the visual arts were interleaved with methods of experimentation in science and philosophy. This book's fresh perspective considers the novel as an art but also as a force in thinking. The critical distance afforded by a view back across the centuries allows Bender to redefine such novelists as Defoe, Fielding, Goldsmith, Godwin, and Laclos by placing them along philosophers and scientists like Newton, Locke, and Hume but also alongside engravings by Hogarth and by anatomist William Hunter. His book probes the kinship among realism, hypothesis, and scientific fact, defining in the process the rhetorical basis of public communication during the Enlightenment.

From its beginnings as a loosely definable group of philosophical ideas to the culmination of its revolutionary effect on public life in Europe, the Age of Enlightenment is the defining intellectual and cultural movement of the modern world. Using reason as its core value, the Enlightenment believed that progress and the betterment of the human condition was inevitable. Inside you will read about… ✓ The Great Thinkers of the Enlightenment ✓ Engaging With Religion ✓ Morality in the Age of Enlightenment ✓ Society in the Age of Enlightenment ✓ Science and Political Economy ✓ The Enlightenment and the Public ✓ Print Culture and the Press Philosophies of the Enlightenment gave birth to the disciplines of political science, economic theory, sociology and anthropology, the disciplines that still form the basis of how we understand life in the 21st century. A bold attack on the Church, the State and the Monarchy, the Age of Enlightenment was a direct challenge to the status quo that sought freedom for all.

Explore notions of destiny and divinity through the lens of the Lumineth Realm-lords Long have the Lumineth Realm-lords held themselves aloof from the troubles of the Mortal Realms. But now, as Nagash asserts his dominion over the living and the dead, the Lumineth must strike back. For Carreth Y’gethin, a legendary warrior and powerful Stonemage, the war against Nagash is merely a distraction from the Lumineth’s true purpose – to hone their spiritual equilibrium and prevent their realm falling back into the madness that once plagued it. But when Carreth’s sister is horrifically killed fighting the undead, he finds himself inexorably drawn back into the struggle. As the Ossiarch Bonereapers invade Hysh, Carreth is charged by Teclis himself to defeat one of Nagash’s most dangerous generals, who is destined to destroy the Light of Eltharion, the Lumineth’s greatest champion. The Stonemage must conquer the warring emotions within and slay this champion of Death, lest the light of Hysh fade from the Mortal Realms forever…

Early in 1788, Franz Anton Mesmer arrived in Paris and began to promulgate an exotic theory of healing that almost immediately seized the imagination of the general populace. Robert Darnton's lively study provides a useful contribution to the study of popular culture and the manner in which ideas are diffused down through various social levels.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR "My new favorite book of all time." --Bill Gates If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. By the author of the new book, Rationality. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.

From science to politics, the era of the the Enlightenment is widely recognized as a crucible for modern Western culture. It has shaped vast portions of the Western world view, including our conceptions and experiences of happiness, family life, the nation-state, and religious and ethnic identities. However, in recent years, scholars from both the sciences and the humanities have debated the question of how we should understand, and to what extent we should endorse, our debt to the Enlightenment. The January 2006 issue of American Behavioral Scientist offers rigorous engagement of pro-Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment perspectives, continuing a debate that began in the late eighteenth century. The opening essays by James Schmidt and Graeme Garrard offer historically and linguistically nuanced defenses of plural uses of the term "enlightenment"— especially to capture the distinction between the process of enlightenment and the era of the Enlightenment. The remaining articles more closely examine several questions about the Enlightenment's legacy for contemporary life: Are we living out the aspirations of the Enlightenment in a critical or tacit manner? Are we witnessing the end of the Enlightenment's pervasive influence on intellectual paradigms, social practices, and nation-states or making room for its further articulation? Which, if any, of these relationships to the Enlightenment are sociologically accurate or normatively preferable? The remaining essays by Darrin M. McMahon, Eileen Hunt Botting, Adam Sutcliffe, Russell Arben Fox, and Damon Linker review these questions from different perspectives and assess the value of the Enlightenment's legacy in various spheres of human life. McMahon's essay focuses on the Enlightenment's impact on the modern understanding of happiness and social welfare. Botting's essay concentrates on how Mary Wollstonecraft's Enlightenment philosophy contributed to the development of the "modern social imaginary" of the egalitarian family. Sutcliffe and Fox illustrate how Western conceptions of religious, ethnic, and national identities have been shaped in critical dialogue with, or in opposition to, the rationalistic, universalistic strands of Enlightenment thought. Linker argues that we should resist Heidegger's rejection of the philosophical process of enlightenment and that we should instead embrace the Enlightenment's promotion of the normative ideal and political practice of critical public discourse about our relationships to one another and the world around us. This issue of American Behavioral Scientist offers an accessible survey of current research on the contemporary relevance of the Enlightenment and should be in the library of every political scientist, sociologist, historian, humanist, philosopher, and student!