Belief in human progress has always depended on a kind of provisional faith. Philosophers of the Enlightenment imagined that it was possible to break the chains of oppression and bring about the ...

‘You are going to women? Do not forget the whip.” This is one of several excerpts from the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that, in his book “Enlightenment Now,” Steven Pinker cites as ...

Asked who the most overrated author was in a recent interview, Steven Pinker, Harvard psychologist-at-large extraordinaire, named Friedrich Nietzsche. He explained, "It's easy to see why his ...

"Opposing reason is, by definition, unreasonable." Steven Pinker is fond of definitions. Early on in this monumental apologia for a currently fashionable version of Enlightenment thinking, he writes: ...

It's been said that there's a Simpsons reference for everything. So why shouldn't there be one for Steven Pinker, the Canadian-American psychologist and pop-science author? Consider the episode in ...

Is Steven Pinker a modern Enlightenment philosophe? In some ways, the comparison seems reasonable. Like the French philosophes, but unlike most contemporary intellectuals, Pinker writes with ...

Steven Pinker, as his blurb reminds us, has been reckoned by Time magazine among the “hundred most influential people in the world today.” In Enlightenment Now he devotes more than five hundred pages ...