The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy

"Never has the story been told so well," said the New York Review of Books of Anthony Gottlieb's The Dream of Reason, an "endlessly entertaining and frequently instructive" (Times Literary Supplement) history of philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance. This long-awaited sequel takes the story through the century and a half when a string of amateurs including Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, and Rousseau remade Western philosophy in the wake of religious upheaval and the rise of Galilean science. What does the new science mean for our understanding of ourselves and of God? How should one deal with religious diversity? These questions remain our questions, but the thinkers who first asked them did not live in our world. The Dream of Enlightenment steps back into the shoes of these frequently misunderstood philosophers, lucidly explains their arguments, and assesses the Enlightenment's legacy.

Anthony Gottlieb is a former executive editor of The Economist and has held visiting fellowships at Harvard University and All Souls College, Oxford. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and the New York Times. He lives in New York.