Reason & Society

Andrew S. Curran , author of the acclaimed Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019), was the guest speaker in a virtual m...

Max Horkheimer's take on Montaigne is far harsher than that of Ivan Sviták . (See previous post and Sviták's essay on Montaigne ....

Once again: Sviták, Ivan. The Dialectic of Common Sense: The Master Thinkers . Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1979. This...

New on my website: Sviták, Ivan. Baron d’Holbach, Philosopher of Common Sense , translated by Jarmila Veltrusky. Chico: California State...

This is the final installment of my review of  A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment by Philipp Blom...

I finally finished reading this 384-page saga:  A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment by Philipp Blom...

I am past the halfway mark through the incredibly detailed, highly readable volume A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the Euro...

"The idea of such powerful agencies has always been associated with that of terror; their name always reminded man of his own calamitie...

Christianity came into the world long after the invention of bread, wine, and other elements of civilization, at a time when it was too lat...

Where all good things come from divine goodness , all evil must necessarily stem from diabolical malice. The two notions are inseparable....

Thus, because religion rules over life and death, heaven and hell, because it transforms laws into the commandments of an all-powerful b...

THE OBSERVATION that intelligence in certain spheres of life can exist side by side with the most unintelligent superstition, political f...

What then has faith in common with love, religion with ethics? Nothing; they have no more in common than have the God to whom man is bound ...

“Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.” – Theodor W. Adorno [1] Ethics as a philosophical or ideological subject is both social and individ...

In previous posts I began to document Paul Kurtz's interaction with the Yugoslav Praxis School , particularly Svetozar Stojanović . Thi...

My discovery of this novel this morning perked up what otherwise started out as a rotten day: Douglass' Women: A Novel by Jewell Park...

"'I think, therefore I am', said Descartes, and the world rejoiced at the perspective of the expansion of individual personalit...