Don’t you love the word “debunk”? Its cheerfully aggressive sound is inseparable from its sense. The second syllable, bunk!, seems…
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!
Enlightenment
On epistemic possibility: A reply to Hirschkind and Tambar
In their thoughtful reflections on The Iranian Metaphysicals, Charles Hirschkind and Kabir Tambar focus on my analysis of how different…
The future of enlightenment: Comparison, tradition, temporality
In The Iranian Metaphysicals, Alireza Doostdar describes his work as contributing to “comparative anthropologies of epistemology”—“how people know things and…
Another story than the other story
What is reality? This is a question historians and philosophers can ask together. Let me use it to ponder the…
The Virtues of Abandon
In 1698 the Parlement of Dijon found a Catholic priest guilty of engaging in sex with members of his flock.…
God in the Enlightenment
In a speech before the Brexit vote, Boris Johnson offered a controversial historical pedigree for his campaign to leave the…
Invisible Hands
Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman’s Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century presents a fascinating exploration of the proliferating logics…
On the recognition of human rights
Samuel Moyn's essay, "Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights," makes an important contribution to our understanding of the…
The Devil: A New Biography
A great deal of ink was spilled in the medieval and early modern period on the nature of demonic copulation.…
Playing God
In his new book Minding the Modern, Thomas Pfau presents a searching, and often scathing, indictment of the modern regime…