This website is intended to provide an introduction to the Enlightenment and important literature about it. The Enlightenment is unfinished, and a number of its purveyors fell short of its ideals. However, the universal ideals reached by the most penetrating and diligent of the philosophes have set the universal moral standard higher than any other streams of thought or ideology (religious or not) to date. The Radical Enlightenment ideals of free inquiry and universal human rights still test our claimed genuine commitments today, especially in the West's relation to the Middle East and the Global South.

Universal Ethical Core: Derived in part from a Hellenistic universalist ethical heritage, the Age of Enlightenment (or Age of Reason) was an epoch of conflict and reaction when "an exultant intellectual movement" rocked Western civilization to its very foundations (Kramnick, 1995). In its conflicted diversity, certain commonalities in theme emerge (cf. Hooker, 1996; Wilson, 1998):

• Universe / lex naturae: Orderly, intelligible Universe of natural law, efficient cause and effect, discoverable through philosophy and science (Deus sive Natura)
• Reason: The "basis for free rational discourse" & the test of what is true (Radical Enlightenment)
  
• Deus sive Natura (God or Nature): Unified, ordered, causally-seamless Universe / Nature may be called God or Nature (radical Deists), or implies a supreme Being (for the moderate and providential Deists, and expanding beyond the natural theology of Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions). This rational foundation of Nature (for the radical, nonprovidential Deists, who were often ontological monists) and implied a universal natural religion and ethics, independent of any of the particular historical, received religions, also influenced moderate Deists who were still Christian at least culturally. The Radical Enlightenment contribution to God-talk, theology, and theistic religion has been bringing prominently into the open a revolutionary and subversive re-imagining of the divine that goes back to the radicals among the ancient Greeks like Democritus and Epicurus, &c., various mystics in each of the major Abrahamic religions, and also to heretics from them such as Ibn al'Arabi, Giordano Bruno, and Benedict de Spinoza, among others. This revolution in God-philosophy / God-language in introduced in our history of cosmology, chapter I, From Mythos to Cosmos and developed further in chapter II, The Enlightenment: Ontology of the Divine and other aspects of theological and religious thought development summarized in the Select Bibliography & Online Resources section below.
  
• Natural rights: The idea that human rights proceed from natural law (Deus sive Natura) and are therefore universal and inalienable, extending beyond tribal in-groups.
  
• Free inquiry / Sapere aude, ('dare to know'): Freedom and toleration are essential for an honest search for truth, religious, scientific, and artistic. This encouraged questioning of religious, political, social, and other received authorities, dogmas, and institutions.
• Unity of knowledge (consilience): Natural law unifies the natural sciences, morals-ethics, the humanities, and ultimately polity / society.
  
• Empiricism: Human understanding of the world can be realized through observation / experience / experiment, reason, and systematic critical analysis, rather than authority. The Scientific Revolution is a source and an outflow.
  
• Progress: Application of reason and science to the human condition as well as to Nature can lead to the improvement of humanity through education—religiously, socially, politically, economically, and physically. Human history tends in that way—an optimism which wavers with the ebbs and flows of Enlightenment values.

Universality: A Copernican Revolution in Morality. The most important moral contribution of the Enlightenment building on its precursors was to again surpass in the ideal of a free republic, the dark and dastardly in-group / out-group 'morals' of one's own tribe over others, the us vs them, tribal moralities of the numerous sectarian strands of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic or Abrahamic religious traditions. Among the Greeks, Diogenes of Sinope (c 412-323 BCE), wandering founder of the Cynic school, argued that we are all a κοσμοπολίτης (a cosmopolity), a community of the world or the cosmos. The Stoic school after Zeno of Citium (c 301 BCE) elaborated the "cosmopolitan" idea of a universal fraternal bonds of humanity, a natural equality of all, whatever one's wealth, social rank, or legal status, including slaves. Stoicism did have some influential on the classical Greco-Roman world. Born a slave in Phrygia, Stoic philosopher Epictetus (c 50 - c 135 CE) cited Diogenes, "I am not an Athenian or a Corinthian, but a citizen of the world" (Discourses, i. 9. 1). Also, "Each human being is primarily a citizen of his own commonwealth; but he is also a member of the great city of gods and men, whereof the city political is only a copy" (Discourses, ii. 5. 26). Philosopher and states councilor, Seneca (c 4 BCE - 65 CE) wrote, "Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies" (Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, Letter 47: On master and slave, 10). Another important step was the 'Euthyphro' dialogue of Socrates (c 380 BCE, cited in the Select Bibliography & Online Resources below) in Plato's Dialogues. Though differing in many details, Stoicism like Epicureanism embraced reason with a naturalistic ethics foundationally based on a monistic cosmology of a universal substance, Eὑποκείμενον, operating through a natural generative mechanism λόγος σπερματικός, (λόγος originally applied earlier by Heraclitus, c 535 - c 475 BCE). Although various schools of Greek philosophy did have their influences over time for good and for ill on the Abrahamic traditions, the ancient universal ethics remained foreign to the Abrahamic various ancient Near Eastern suzerainty covenantal ingroup / outgroup ethics, and in core, these religions still have not broken free of them. What the philosophes particularly of the Radical Enlightenment achieved was a recovery of a Copernican Revolution in morality to go with the Copernican Revolution in cosmology, the arising of universal ethics from a monistic cosmology of the Universe. After the 18th century with the arising of modern biological evolutionary theory, we see that at its core, morality is rooted in reciprocity, even at the ancient microbial level, and emerges with increasing multicellularity and complexity, in eusociality and then biological empathy. In our modern time when we still face the threat of self-inflicted nuclear annihilation (on the details and threat of nuclear weaponry, see Sublette, 1994-present; cited below), and the looming specter of environmental and ecosystem collapse, the importance of biological reciprocity, empathy, and empirical foundations of morality must be given priority. [To find discussions written for a wide audience on evolutionary science's contributions to our understanding of moral foundations, and thinking about the big religious questions, see Dowd (2007) and de Waal (2009; 2013). More details on the science will be included in the section on the cosmic ubiquity of life and the evolution of life on Earth in our Cosmos website]. The influence of cosmology, the evolution of our conceptions of the Universe upon our religions, philosophy, scientific inquiry, and moral outlooks is explored here: https://enlightenmentlegacy.net/cosmos.

The Enlightenment legacy of free inquiry by reason, philosophy, history, and empirical science (natural philosophy) is the framework for questioning of the old tribalisms, dogmas, paradigms, and societal structures in the West. The modern framework for the ongoing struggle to advance universal human rights, equality, and international norms of justice, such as in the UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and other standards of international human rights law before and since, arose from the breakthroughs of the Enlightenment era by the Radical philosophers which became incorporated in such advances as the ideals behind the US Declaration of Independence (1776), the French Revolution's Declaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen (1789), and in the US Constitutional Amendments in the Bill of Rights (1791). In American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments hold the Secret to Healing our Nation (2021), Seth Radwell argues the rift in American politics results from the American Revolution and founding being based on the Radical versus the Moderate Enlightenments, notably the Radical Declaration (1776) and the Moderate Constitution (1787-1789), along with counter-Enlightenment trends too. Ideas do change the world. But as history illustrates, the ongoing survival of even such world-changing ideas can be fragile and precarious.

An annotated historical chronology of the Enlightenment (adapted from Israel, 2023. Historical Dictionary of the Enlightenment. [2nd edition]. Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Rowman & Littlefield; referenced below), with increased emphasis on various aspects of philosophy and of natural philosophy or the sciences, including events and works of importance in the brief History of Cosmology: In the midst of the Scientific Revolution / Enlightenment era in 1670, in the Dutch Republic 'Golden Age,' which was the epicenter of the early Radical Enlightenment in its clandestine cradle before the intellectual revolution had fully spread throughout the Atlantic world across four continents (Eurasia, North and South Americas), Dutch architect and cartographer Frederik De Wit (1629/1630-1706) also made a map of the starry heavens, which included the traditional Greek / Arabic constellations as well as the 12 new southern constellations added because of exploration by Johannes Bayer in his 1661 revision of the Uranometria to make a new atlas of the skies, which also included the competing cosmologies of the ferment of the times: A contested opening of cosmology world-views accompanied and perhaps drove the contested opening and Enlightening of the Western mind:

Select Bibliography & Online Resources: This bibliography references not only scholarship on the Enlightenment and it antecedents, and progeny, but also scholarly works exemplifying the approach to scholarship championed by the philosophes, in the various strands of Enlightenment. An ongoing legacy of Enlightenment is the expanding work of scholarship in philosophy, epistemology, anthropology / ethology, history, origins of myth and religious traditions, as well as historical and contemporary issues of human freedom, human rights, and human equality before universal law, and also to bear witness to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. We include these in this select resource.

18th Century, Wiley Online Library. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/17414113/homepage/18th_century.htm.

The 18th Century Common: "A public humanities website for enthusiasts of 18th-century studies." https://www.18thcenturycommon.org/. This internet common space was inspired by Richard Holmes (2009) The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (New York: Vintage), referenced below. As described again below, this popular, widely-read work also stirred something deep in 18th century scholarship by recapturing via the medium of biographies exploring how the scientists of the "second scientific revolution" in what is considered the Romantic era, formed a unique historical interface of Romantic art / poetry along with their Romantic awe of science / wonder. 18th century scholars in response created this large common space for reflection and scholarship on this unearthed Enlightenment theme: https://www.18thcenturycommon.org/about/. One section is specifically, a response of scholars to Holmes (2009): https://www.18thcenturycommon.org/collections/the-age-of-wonder/. Major collections include a plethora of scholarship on art, poetry, literature, social science, philosophy, social commentary, and women's studies, &c., in anthologies which also overlap: 

• "2018 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies" (ASECS) conference papers and presentations (https://www.18thcenturycommon.org/collections/asecs-and-v21/).
  
• "Cognitive science and 18th century studies" (https://www.18thcenturycommon.org/collections/cognitive-science-and-18th-century-studies/).
  
• "Criminality in the Eighteenth century" (https://www.18thcenturycommon.org/collections/criminality/).
• "Digital Humanities and 18th-Century Studies," an eclectic collection of archival material, women's studies, anthologies, literature, and science, &c., from the long 18th (https://www.18thcenturycommon.org/collections/digital-humanities-18th-century-studies/).
• "Eighteenth-Century Anthropocene Cultures," a special collection which shows the growing sense in the 18th century early arising of industrialism under Enlightenment scrutiny, that the beautiful Earth is being changed by pangs of 'modernity' from art to John Locke to Jane Austin, &c., a new Cenozoic geological epoch, now called the Anthropocene (https://www.18thcenturycommon.org/collections/eighteenth-century-anthropocene-cultures/). The modern artistic yearning, wistfulness, and poignancy of the writings of anthropologist Loren Eiseley, capture some of the same; cf. A Return to Vision literature anthology of Cherry, Conley, and Hirsh (1966, 1974). 
  
• "Gardens and Landscapes," a small collection celebrating the garden and landscaping from classical memories of Epicurus to Voltaire and others in 18th century thought (https://www.18thcenturycommon.org/collections/gardens-and-landscapes/).
  
• "Historical Fiction Set in the 18th Century," a broad collection of novels from the Enlightenment era which essentially gave us the modern art form of the novel (https://www.18thcenturycommon.org/collections/historical-fiction-set-in-the-18th-century/).
  
• "Jane Austen," a collection of essays on the most important of 18th century novelists, and a wealth of information on the sitz im leben of women in the 18th century, through her eyes (https://www.18thcenturycommon.org/collections/jane-austen/). 
• "Miscellany," a wonderful collection of orphaned essays on topics from Radical Pierre Bayle, to forgotten women writers before Jane Austen, the philosophy of an other Radical the Marquis d'Argens, the first novel from Haiti in the Age of Revolution, and appeals to the dear Reader to contribute to the 18th century common (https://www.18thcenturycommon.org/collections/miscellany/). (This collection, here and more broadly the entire 18th century common website, reminds me of the tonal feeling of working with my undergraduate professor in my favorite upper division English major course, 18th century literature, my friend the late Dr. Herbert Roth—wishing we could sit down together today, a literary Proustean "remembrance of things passed," and pun intended).
  
• "Staging The Mysterious Mother," a collection of essays by theater actors and others involved in the 2018 celebration of this famous horror / gothic piece by Horace Walpole (https://www.18thcenturycommon.org/collections/staging-the-mysterious-mother/).
• "Women’s Lives in the 18th Century," a broad collection of scholarly essays on the lives of women (including women of color) as revealed in "18th century history, literature, art, and culture," including in the science of astronomy with William and Caroline Herschel and the artistic world of Jane Austen (https://www.18thcenturycommon.org/collections/womens-lives-in-the-18th-century/).
• "The Age of Wonder, Scholars and Students Respond to Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder," another eclectic collection of essays reflecting on the fusion of art and science gifted to us by the legacy of the 18th century (https://www.18thcenturycommon.org/collections/the-age-of-wonder/).
• "Science and the Arts in the Long 18th Century," another gathering of scholarly work on the interfaces of literature, the arts, and the sciences in the 18th century, from "philosophy in the Epicurean garden" to the quest for longitude in an age of exploration, to "language and Enlightenment," to the Enlightenment contributions of Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles, &c. (https://www.18thcenturycommon.org/collections/science-art/). Another feast for the mind.    
  

18thConnect: A searchable archive of "913,585 peer-reviewed digital objects from 67 federated sites" from within the 1660-1800 time frame. https://18thconnect.org/.

Abu Sitta, S. H. 1999. Palestinian Right to Return: Sacred, Legal, and Possible. London, UK: The Palestinian Return Centre (https://prc.org.uk/). Palestine Land Society (https://www.plands.org/en/about): https://www.plands.org/en/books-reports/books/palestine-right-of-return (2nd edition). Salman Abu Sitta is an extraordinary scholar, who on the basis of Enlightenment-supported values of equity, fairness, and human rights transcends the modern political usages of Abrahamic covenantalism and ingroup / outgroup amorality, to propose a resolution to the modern 'Arab-Israeli' conflict involving equal rights and a right of return where Palestinians and Israelis may live side by side in equality for all citizens, whatever their religion or background, on the unbroken historic land of Palestine / Israel. A few brave Israeli scholars have also made the liberating internal journey to see this as the only real solution for a lasting peace with justice in the contemporary Middle East. 

____. 2000. (Compiled). The Palestinian Nakba of 1948: The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine. London, UK: Palestinian Return Centre. https://www.plands.org/en/books-reports/books/the-palestinian-nakba-1948. (2nd edition). With the precision and brevity of his higher education as a civil engineer Dr. Abu Sitta has tabulated these locals and their dislocated populations.

____. 2001. From Refugees to Citizens at Home: The End of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. London, UK: Palestine Land Society / Palestinian Return Centre. https://www.plands.org/en/books-reports/books/from-refugees-to-citizens-at-home.

____. 2007. The Return Journey: A Guide to the Depopulated and Present Palestine Towns and Villages and Holy Sites (Atlas in English). London, UK: Palestine Land Society. https://www.plands.org/en/maps-atlases/atlases/the-return-journey. A cartographic plenitude mapping the way home for the refugee children of Palestine in a new united Palestine with equal rights for Palestinians and Israelis, of whatever religion or cultural heritage, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim: https://www.plands.org/en/maps-atlases/atlases/the-return-journey/return-jounrney-pdfs. See the PLS hub of atlases and maps: https://www.plands.org/en/maps-atlases.

____. 2010. (Compiled). The Atlas of Palestine, 1917-1966: A most comprehensive record of Palestine 1917-1966: The British Mandate, al Nakba, and the aftermath. (In English). A massive and intricately documented cartography of Palestine annotated from primary source and other material from the archives, telling the story of Palestine before the Nakba and since, along with the populational compositions, origins, land ownership, massacres, expulsions, and the destruction of the natural landscape. https://www.plands.org/en/maps-atlases/atlases/atlas-of-palestine-1917-1966; archived PDFs.

____. 2016. Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir. Cairo, Egypt: The American University in Cairo Press. Abu Sitta tells his own story as a survivor and refugee of the massacres and expulsions of al Nakba. For an excellent academic review, see Irfan, Anne. 2017. 'Mapping my return: a Palestinian memoir' (PDF). British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 44 (2), 283. https://doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2016.1272216.

____. 2020. The survey of western Palestine revisited: The visible and the hidden. A presentation in two lectures (cf. link) on the cartographic 'Survey of Western Palestine' (~56% of Palestine) between 1871-1877, by the still thriving Palestine Exploration Fund (https://www.pef.org.uk/), with documents & maps. This is a review of the original survey as well as the rectified cartographic republication of the Survey, including a review of the original work on mapping, archaeology, ethnography of the 19th century population of Palestine, and the flora / fauna and natural history of Palestine: https://www.plands.org/en/articles-speeches/speeches/2020/the-survey-of-western-palestine-revisited.

____. 2020. Atlas of Palestine: 1871-1877. (English) London, UK: Palestine Land Society. This is the cartographic classic, using triangulation points-rectified locations, along with since-discovered locales in this expanded version of the original Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) 1871-1877 'Survey' (itself built on classic cartography done under the late-Enlightenment era auspices of Napoleon Bonaparte, and even before with Islamic cartography from ~1100 CE), complete with "13,000 place names | 500 pages of maps in colour | Index of localities," of which Prof. Abu Sitta wrote, "This is Arab Palestine [cultural home to Arab culture of Palestinians of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faith heritage], before the Zionlist colonisation." https://www.plands.org/en/maps-atlases/atlases/atlas-of-palestine-1871-1877.

Abu Sitta, S. H. with Molavi, S. C. (Researcher-in-Charge). 2023. Executions and mass graves in Tantura. PLS here (https://www.plands.org/en/articles-speeches/articles/2023/executions-and-mass-graves-in-tantura) the panoramic research in this forensic discovery of a mass grave (with the mapping of geographical oral memory persisting and evidence) from a massacre committed by Zionist forces on the 22-23 May 1948 in the coastal village of Tantura, during al Nakba: https://tantura.forensic-architecture.org/. The very coastal lands of Palestine cry out in this 'forgotten' and now remembered massacre from the general genocidal displacement of al Nakba in 1948.

Allen, Ethan (1737/1738-1789). American Revolution era farmer, writer, officer in the Continental Army, statesman, founder of Vermont, and one known for the capture of Fort Ticonderoga (1775; link; cf. https://www.revolutionary-war.net/ethan-allen/; https://ethanallenhomestead.org/). Writer of the 1784 Deist volume, Reason the only Oracle of Man, or A Compenduous System of Natural Religion, alternatively Adorned with Confutations of a variety of Doctrines imcompatible to it; Deduced form the most exalted Ideas which we are able to form of the Divine and Human character and from the Universe in General. Bennington, VT: Haswell & Russell. https://ethanallenhomestead.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/reasononlyoracl00allegoog.pdf.

American Indian federal democracy treaty legacy: Great Law of Peace of ~1100 CE; 1890 Cayuga version manuscript. In the pre-Columbian 'New World' of North America, https://daily.jstor.org/the-native-american-roots-of-the-u-s-constitution/, the Iroquois Confederacy (5 & then 6 nations: Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, & later addition of Tuscarora) had a federal democracy ~600 years prior to the US Constitution: https://atlantaciviccircle.org/2021/11/17/native-americas-influence-on-american-democracy/. In sharp contrast with the Ancient Near Eastern imperial suzerainty treaty / covenantalism (from which the Abrahamic religions derive): The Indigenous American federal democracy law of the Iroquois Confederacy or Federation consisted of (link):

• (i) Narrative—formation of the Iroquois federation,
  
• (ii) Constitution, with federalism (local nation and central government) and separation of powers
• Federation decision categories & chronicled record on Wampum:
  
• (a) Peace treaties
• (b) Trade agreements
• (c) War & Peace
• Consensus decision-making:
  
• (a) Mohawk & Seneca reach consensus—>
• (b) Cayuga & Oneida reach consensus—>
• (c) Onandaga render judgment—> (a), &c.
  
• (d) Repeat (a), (b), and (c), &c. ...until there's a full consensus
  
• (iii) Ceremonies to ratify the federal democratic alliance
  

designed to end conflicts by the fair representation of the 5 and then the 6 nations of the confederation. Cf. Kickenbird (1987) and Miller (2015) referenced below. The US constitutional law debt was finally acknowledged by the US Senate two centuries later in 1988: https://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/hconres331.pdf. (Compare & contrast with the 'Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) Suzerainty imperial treaty covenantalism' cited below, as well as on the Nature of morality—See also the entry on the Euthyphro Dialogue, ~380 BCE).

American Indian Digital History Project, the University of Kansas: https://www.aidhp.com/. This archive includes various journals, magazines, and other resources. Within the Project, there is also the Indian Historian journal collection: https://www.aidhp.com/collections/show/10.

Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) Suzerainty imperial treaty covenantalism (link): The legal foundation of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In the ancient imperial city-states of the post-Agricultural Revolution fertile crescent of the Ancient Near East, suzerain-vassal treaties were made between the great king and the vassal king, or between the suzerain deity and the vassal city-state king. This imperial war arrangement involved a discrimination on the part of the suzerain in favor of his treaty vassal and against his sovereign enemies (covenantal ingroup amorality vs. outgroup; CIAO). In the Abrahamic religions, the covenant suzerain treaty form was adopted and adapted from the ancient Hittite-Assyrian imperial suzerainty treaties (see the pioneering work of Meredith Cline, 1963. Treaty of the Great King: The Covenant Structure of Deuteronomy: Studies and Commentary. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmanns; 160 pp; Coogan, M. D. 2009. A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press; p. 100; cf. Morrow, W. S. 2021. Ancient Near Eastern treaty traditions and biblical covenants: Recent surveys. Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 21, 1. https://doi.org/10.5508/jhs29595) in this adapted format (compare & contrast with the 'American Indian federal democracy treaty legacy' cited above, as well as on the Nature of morality—See also the entry on the Euthyphro Dialogue (~380 BCE).

• (i) Title / Identifying Preamble—identifies the sovereign party, his greatness, his lineage, &c, great king (Suzerain) and the vassal party: “Thus says the great King...," &c.
  
• (ii) Historical Recital Prologue—Suzerain's many benefactions and wonderful deeds to the undeserving vassal, who has many faults and weaknesses.
  
• (iii) Treaty Covenant law Stipulations—(a) Suzerain's great law & (b) statutory obligations for the vassal to fulfill.
  
• (iv) Ratification oath / blood sacrifice, witnesses & sanctions—
• (a) Oath before witnesses,
  
• (b) Sacrificial meal—redemptive bloodshed & sacred meal:
  
• (c) Sanctions:
  
• Blessings / Benedictions—Distributive – land grant, protection, &c.
  
• Curses / Maledictions—Retributive – loss of vassalage, captivity, death, &c.
  
• (v) Perpetual Dynastic Succession—“everlasting covenant” renewal
• – Covenant tablets placed “under the feet of the suzerain's god” 
• – Ritually renewed regularly—witnesses & by blood (cf. annual Yom Kippur ritual sacrifices) and sacrificial meal (cf. Pesach / Passover ritual sacrificial meal), &c.

Annett, K. D. 2012. Hidden No Longer: Genocide in Canada, Past and Present. (425 pp. full PDF) International Tribunal into the Crimes of Church and State & Friends of the Disappeared. University of Saskatchewan, Library, Indigenous Studies Portal: https://iportal.usask.ca/record/32309; Scribd link; abridged version (113 pp): http://canadiangenocide.nativeweb.org/genocide.pdf; http://canadiangenocide.nativeweb.org/truth_commission.html. cf. http://murderbydecree.com/files/MurderByDecree.pdf. 387 pp. documenting genocide of First Nations from the European arrival to the settler colonial period to the Indian residential school system in Canada, and responding to the coverup of the 'truth and reconciliation commission.' This book, its earlier versions, and the research therein has been ruthlessly suppressed by the supporters, enablers, and apologists for the American Holocaust and the specific genocide of memory in Canada. The 2006 documentary is based on an earlier version of the book, entitled, Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust: "Unrepentant: Kevin Annett and Canada's Genocide" (https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/unrepentant-kevin-annett-canadas-genocide/; 2:14:51 h). Cf. interview with Prof. Andrew Wolford, "With intent to destroy a group: Genocides past and present in Canada" (link). The voice of conscience of former medical inspector for the Department of Indian Affairs, Dr. Peter Henry Bryce, [1922. The Story of A National Crime by... being an Appeal for Justice to the Indians of Canada: The Wards of the Nation: Our Allies in the Revolutionary War: Our Brothers-In-Arms in the Great War [WWI]. Ottawa, Canada: James Hope & Sons. Price 35 cents. (32 pp); full PDF]. To Dr. Bryce's and others' frantic queries and agitation (1907; 1910; &c.) about reducing the terrible average death rates of 50% from deliberate exposure of healthy native children to native children infected with tuberculosis (denial of proper treatment or quarantine) and other abuses within those schools—where the government-forced taking or kidnapping of Indigenous children into state-funded, Catholic and Protestant church-operated Indian Residential Schools—Bryce begged that the state take away their control from the churches. Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott refused because "the churches would not have it." Dr. Bryce's internal report was repressed and he was fired. In 1910, Deputy Superintendent Campbell Scott abolished medical inspection of the school, turning over legal guardianship of the children to the churches. Until the abolition of the Residential Schools in the late 20th century, ~50,000-60,000 Indian children died in them from poor conditions, including countless more brutalized, sexually abused, starved, beaten, exposed to cold, deliberate exposure to TB and other infectious diseases, experimentation, sadism, and even direct murder. Deputy Superintendent Campbell Scott wrote on 12 April 1910 to an Indian agent in British Columbia these terrible and foreshadowing words (Ibid., 2012; pp. 46-47):

• "It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to disease by habituating in these schools, and that as a consequence, they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But such is in keeping with the policy of this Department, which is geared towards the final solution of the Indian problem." (Letter to Indian Superintendent for B.C. Major D. McKay, INAC archives, RG 10 series).
  

Αποκατάστᾰσις (apokatastasis) or restoration / reconciliation of everything to God or the cosmic source, i.e., Universalism (Christian or otherwise; i.e., cf. Acts 3:21 building perhaps from Rom. 8:21, &c.; I Cor. 15). Just like the Copernican Revolution was a surpassing of an Earth-centric / anthropocentricity and a recovery in cosmology of the Aristarchan revolution of a Sun-centered celestial system or cosmology (see chapter I. Mythos to Cosmos: World-views from the Paleolithic through the {Aristarchan-}Copernican Revolution to Willem de Sitter (>3 Mya to early 20th century), so the Radical Enlightenment was the beginning of a recovery of a universal morality, a universal ethic, now instantiated in modern evolutionary biology / game theory of reciprocity / altruism (used to be called sociobiology but now evolutionary psychology). We can call this universeal because there is altruism beyond-kin altruism and the cooperation of symbionts, including endosymbionts (mitochondria from α-proteobacteria in eukaryotic cells & chloroplasts from cyanobacteria also in eukayrotes), of species in an ecosystem, and of ecosystems in a biosphere, &c., so the moral universal Copernican Revolution of the Radical Enlightenment was the start of a recovery of the universal ethics of the best among the ancient Greeks, and also it seems of elements in the Axial Age religions, Buddhism, &c., and also Axial descendants such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. One of the so-called Abrahamic religions, most notably Christianity, had early strands of universalism in their greatest thinkers, and some of the Christian thinkers have argued that there are roots in ancient Israelite religion as expressed in the Tanakh (תַּנַ״ךְ) or what the Christians call the 'Old Testament' (OT), but especially evident in the 27 booklets, perhaps more so those of Pauline, deutero-Pauline, and pseudo-Pauline provenance of the New Testament (NT) and early Jesus movement / Christian history. See more discussion and documentation under the two entries below for "Hanson, J. W., D.D. 1899. Universalism the Prevailing Doctrine of the Christian Church during Its First Five Hundred Years...." for a biblicist, philological, Christian patristic approach, and "Hart, D. B. 2019. That All shall be Saved...." for a moral philosophical, historical-critical biblical, and Christian patristic approach.


Armstrong, K. 1993. A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. New York, NY: Random House, Ballentine. The rise and maturing of the philosophy of history and of historical-critical research as a fruit of the Enlightenment has shown that our belief-systems are not axiomatic givens, but arise as products of the ferment of place, time, and culture in human history, and stimulate philosophical and moral thought. Other works listed here in this broad category include Aslan (2017), Neville (1992), Smith (2002), Romer (2015), Stavrakopoulou (2021), and others which will be added.

____. 2009. The Case for God. New York, NY: Random House. A review of views of 'god' or the transcendent from human prehistory and into human history, centered around whether the religious devotion of Homo religiosis (humankind) is centered on a mere superlative being, or upon Being as the whole of the Universe. The best of Enlightenment thought, and going back to the ancient Greek and to the Islamic Arab Enlightenments, gravitates toward the latter.

Aslan, R. 2017. God: A Human History. New York, NY: Random House. In reviewing the history of religion and of gods since the Paleolithic, Aslan reviews how humans are wired to impute familiar human characteristics onto the divine. He goes on to argue that humans must transcend this instinctive mindset to more fully apprehend the divine.

Avi Schlaim. 2023. Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew. London, UK: Oneworld Publications. This brave Arab Jewish scholar (Arab in culture and Jewish in religion) shatters the myths raised by modern Zionism to reveal the truth about the ancient and attempted-to-be-erased heritage of Arab Jews in Iraq and the rest of the Arab / Islamic world over the centuries), including direct evidence now of Zionist false flag terror attacks perpetrated to force them to flee from their native Iraq to the new Zionist state in Palestine in 1950. Abu Sitta reviews within powerful, touching, myth-busting memoir, pointing out the parallels between his own life as a Palestinian refugee scholar and that of Prof. Schlaim's: https://www.plands.org/en/articles-speeches/articles/2023/zionism-is-an-ashkenazi-thing.

Bayle, Pierre. Nouvelles de la Republic des Lettres (literary critical journal, 1684-1687); Pensees Diverses sur l'Occasion de la Comete...de...1680 (1682) against superstition and for natural causation and one of the Radical champions of libertas philosophandi, or freedom to pursue and express the searching(s) of philosophy; his masterpiece was the Dictionnaire Philosophique et Critique (1695-1697; 1702, enlarged; best translation that of P. des Maizeaux, 4 vols., 1740: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009722603). https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/; https://archive.org/search; the correspondence of Bayle, Bodleian portal.

Barr, J. 1984. Escaping from Fundamentalism. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. Along with Stark's (2011) Human Faces of God referenced below, Christian scholar Barr helps bring biblical criticism within the tradition of the Enlightenment to fundamentalists, on issues of scriptural authority / inspiration, historicity, legends and myths, morality, prophetic claims, theology, on science and origins, and on textual transmission.  

de Beauvoir, Simone 1908-1986. 1949. Le Deuxième Sexe, i.e., The Second Sex. NRF essais (in French). Vol. 1. Les Faits et les Mythes, i.e., Facts and Myths. Gallimard. de Beauvoir was an important existentialist philosopher and novelist, as well as a founder of modern feminist philosophy. This work is a revolutionary historical and creative query about the circumstances and root causes of women's plight in the modern world. She was a collaborator with and companion of Sartre.

_____. 1949. Le Deuxième Sexe. NRF essais (in French). Vol. 2. L'Expérience Vécue /or Experience. Gallimard.

Besterman, T. 1969. Voltaire. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, & World. Besterman's biography of the great philosophe Voltaire is close to a definitive biography. Besterman is the scholar who started the process of editing all of the works of Voltaire in a project called Oeuvres Completes de Voltaire, (https://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/oeuvres-completes-de-voltaire/), an edited critical edition project which Besterman started in 1968 and which was finished by a team in 2022 (with 205 volumes, referenced below under Voltaire).  

Bevilacqua, A. 2018. The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press / Belknap Press: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv24trd01; https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv24trd01. Christian scholars of both Catholic and Protestant persuasion in Europe of the 17th and 18th centuries provided the first accurate translation of the Qur'an into a European language. In the Enlightenment era, Europeans grew to appreciate the poetic beauty of the Qur'an, the architecture, arts, sciences, and military genius of Islamic culture heretofore (link). Jacob Soll (2018) wrote an excellent review of the volume in The New Republic: "How Islam shaped the Enlightenment: A new book covers the work of scholars who helped establish greater understanding between religions": https://newrepublic.com/article/147961/islam-shaped-enlightenment. Of greater importance, these scholars' preceding work laid the foundation for the Radical Enlightenment recognition and appreciation of Radicalism in the Islamic tradition. See Jonathan Israel (2008), "The Islamic world and the Radical Enlightenment: Toleration, freethinking, and personal liberty": https://www.ias.edu/ideas/2008/israel-islamic-world (cited below).

Brenner, L. 1983. Zionism in the Age of the Dictators. UK: Croom Helm. Brenner describes how Zionism collaborated with fascism, including Nazism, in order to promote Jewish immigration to Palestine, and the reckless disregard of the dangers facing Jews under fascism, even with the looming Nazi Holocaust. Brenner points out the parallels between fascistic nationalism and Zionism. Although critiqued, scholarship has continued to vindicate Brenner in his seeing the collaborative nature of Zionist fascism with other right-wing fascistic nationalisms before and since the War too, including dictatorships in Central and South American, Myanmar, and Apartheid South Africa. Cf. Greenstein, 2022, cited below.

____. (editor). 2002. 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis. Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books. This volume with its critical compilation of documents by leaders and organizers in Zionist thought, builds upon the research summarized in Brenner's 1983 work.  

Bronner, S. E. 2004. Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. An excellent corrective against a then (2004) half-century of "critical theory" and kindred 'postmodern' assaults on the values of the Enlightenment.

Calloway, C. G. 1995. The American Revolution in Indian country: Crisis and diversity in Native American communities. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Set in the time of ferment, including the ideas of Enlightenment, and the vast changes which preceded the American Revolution of the late 18th century in the new world of North America, Calloway starts in 1775, reviews briefly the demographic collapse among Native Americans which took place between 1492 and then, citing important literature on what has been aptly called the American Holocaust, and then goes on to review the different strategies for survival by various specific nations and tribes of American Indians who lived along the Atlantic seaboard in that world of the Revolution, the dark and even genocidal references to the vanishing Native America in even the Radical 1776 Declaration of Independence, and the eliminationist ideation and genocidal results within the expanding settler colonial America of the Revolution and beyond. Ultimately, this time also includes a glimpse into the story of Native, indigenous survival and adaptation. 

Cameron, C. 2019. Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Helps dispel the mythology about how African American radicalism in the push for abolition, civil rights, and liberation is inextricable from traditional cultural religiosity.

Churchill, W. 1997. A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers. Meticulously documented, Churchill's volume presents together both the genocide and holocaust of indigenous Americans, as well as the holocaust of memory in official and scholarly denial of the centuries-long and multi-faceted catastrophe of the American Holocaust (1492-present). Churchill's volume is an excellent follow up on David Stannard's American Holocaust (1992), also furthering the discussion of persistent academic denialism of the American Holocaust and its denial.

Clarke, J. H. 1992, 1998. 2011, 2014. Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust: Slavery and the Rise of European Capitalism. Bensenville, IL: Lushena Books. This power little volume, richly annotated, lays out the disastrous Holocaust against sub-Saharan Africans in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the trafficking displace of tens of millions of people, untold millions of whom did not survive the middle passage, before embarking on lives of oppression and desolation in the centuries of enslavement. Somewhat parallel to David Stannard (American Holocaust, 1992, referenced below), Prof. Clarke shows the connection between the Columbian conquests, the Abrahamic religious traditions, and the advent of modern capitalism. African Union links: https://akb.au.int/handle/AKB/27811; African Union Library link.

Compier, A., MD. 2024. The Islamic origins of Renaissance humanism. https://rationalreligion.co.uk/the-islamic-origins-of-renaissance-humanism/. Gives an overview and summarizes literature elucidating the role of Arab-Islamic scholarship and advancements in the Renaissance humanism in Europe, and in the roots of modern Western civilization, including in the categories of knowledge: Adabiya —> studia humanitatis, Nahw —> grammar, Khatba —> rhetoric, Shi’r —> poetry, Tarikh —> history, and ‘Ilm al-Akhlaq —> moral philosophy. Compier also brings out how anti-Arab / anti-Muslim historians have attempted "the ethnic cleansing of humanism" from Arab-Islamic contributions to its history, including some representatives of modern secular humanism. The article sadly does not take into account the close connection between Radical Enlightenment and radical, visionary Islamic scholars. Interview of the author: videolink.

Costo, R. & Costo, J. H. 1987. The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide. San Francisco, CA: Indian Historian Press. Published for the American Indian Historical Society. This is a distillation of histories, oral memory, and protests against the then-proposed canonization of Fr. Juan Junipero Serra, and so forth, in memorializing the genocidal legacy of the missions and the missions period in California history, before the Republic, and the eventual statehood of California.

Cowles, C. S., Merrill, E. H., Gard, D. L., Longman III, T. 2003. Show Them No Mercy: 4 Views on God and Canaanite Genocide. Counterpoints Exploring Theology. Gundry, S. N. (series editor). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. This evangelical Protestant anthology of dialogue is a conservative biblicist attempt to come to terms with the genocides prescribed in the Torah against the Canaanites.

Creation & Catastrophe: 1948. A documentary about the Israel-Palestinian conflict: https://www.1948movie.com/.

Crecganford: "A Research and Education organisation, specialising in Mythology." 2019-present. Academic Jon L. White, learned in mythology & religious history, legends & folklore, hosts, makes documentaries on myth and origins of myths, utilizing the latest research in linguistics, phylogenetic analysis, and historical / prehistorical critical analyses, to tell the stories of our stories going back tens of thousands of years: Video channel; https://crecganford.com/. In addition to a growing library, Prof. White curates the Mythology & Folklore Database: https://www.mythologydatabase.com/; building on and a window into the original Berezkin-Duvakin Mythology Database in Russian (https://www.ruthenia.ru/folklore/berezkin/) which White translated into English: https://www.mythologydatabase.com/bd/. See also Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore (https://www.folklore.ee/folklore/) referenced in this bibliography. The Crecganford resource is also important for the chapter I. From Mythos to Cosmos: World-views from the Paleolithic through the (Aristarchan-)Copernican Revolution to Willem de Sitter (~3.3 Mya to the early 20th century) in our history of cosmology website: https://enlightenmentlegacy.net/cosmos/.

'Death of God' / Theothanatology, from the words for 'god' and 'death' in Greek, θεός and θάνατος (link). A trend in radical philosophy and theology in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment (modern and postmodern) thought which revives tendencies among mystics and freethinkers (/ heretics) going back at least to the ancient Greeks, about a radical re-conceptualization of the nature of the divine in relation to the world (κόσμος), to historical and to societal, social change. In the narrow, the 'death of God' motif refers to the Radical in that it penetrates beyond and after our ancient Paleolithic conceptions of spirits and deities, beyond the deities of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic, and the deities, including the Axial deities, of the Iron Age civilizations to a revolutionary re-visioning of the divine and the Universe manifesting in roots of Greek naturalistic monism, and perhaps also in Indian Charvaka skepticism in the late centuries BCE, the former which revived in transmission and traces of subversive thought during the Renaissance, as well as recurring among radical mystics in Axial religious traditions. Drawing from these roots, including Greek radical thought in transmission of Lucretius' Rerum Natura, in the early Radical Enlightenment, thinkers such as Giordano Bruno, Benedict de Spinoza, and others were contemplating naturalist monism in a broad transition, which can be interpreted as foundational (cf. history of cosmology, chapter I. From Mythos to Cosmos; cf. Dylan Shaul's work: videolink; also see more extensive development in chapter II. The Enlightenment: Ontology of the Divine). As a theological motif, the 'death of God' was proclaimed by English poet, engraving-maker / artist, and mystic, William Blake (1757-1827), a sympathetic supporter of Enlightenment values and anti-dogmatic in religion, he linked the 'death of god' with God in Christ kenotically (κένωσις from Phil. 2:7 ) self-emptying Godhood through Christ's crucifixion, thereby opening in place of transcendence a new world immanent with possibilities because 'primordial Totality' had 'self-annihilated' in the Christ event [cf. Thomas J. J. Altizer, "William Blake and the role of myth in radical Christian vision" (link) in T. J. J. Altizer & William Hamilton (eds.). 1966. Radical Theology and the Death of God (link). Indianapolis, IN / New York, NY / Kansas City, MO: Bobbs-Merrill, a subsidiary of Howard Sams & Co.]. By the 19th century, the motif was taken up by German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) who was influenced not only by Protestant mystic Jakob Böhme, the German Idealists Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, but also by broadly by Spinoza and the German 'pantheism controversy' (Pantheismusstreit or Spinozismusstreit) of the 1780s. Hegel laid out the 'death of God' in a typical Hegelian dialectic dynamic of Absolute (God, Father) dying or suffering negation in the incarnation of Christ (as Son), and further negated in the crucifixion of Christ, leading to the rise of Holy Spirit, concretely manifest (church) and absolutely manifest (spiritual community), opening the possibility of a final revelation of God as Absolute Consciousness. Frederich Nietzsche (1844-1900) linked the 'death of God' to the rise of science (including the theory of evolution) and advancing secularism in Western civilization which had killed the transcendent Abrahamic deity, although most did not know it yet. He argued that this presented a crisis for humankind, by which both tradition and nihilism should be resisted. Many currents forwarded the dialogue on the 'death of god' motif, e.g., Matthew Arnold's "Dover." In 1903, Bertrand Russell proclaimed that philosophy must henceforth conform to the stark and indifferent Universe revealed by modern science ("A free man's worship" in The Independent Review, Dec 1903; link). In the 20th century, Heidegger equated the 'death of God' with the death of metaphysics and metaphysical systems. These anxieties came to the fore in Sartre, in Walter Stace's 1948 and his 1952, both cited below under the W. T. Stace entries. Theothanatology became famous with the 1960s 'death of god' theologians which also included the anthology assembled by Thomas J.J. Altizer and William Hamilton (1966). Radical Theology and the Death of God. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill; And in Judaism, see Richard L. Rubenstein (1992), “God After the Death of God” in After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism, (2nd ed). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press; pp 293-306. More recent Slavoj Žižek (2009). The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Daniel J. Peterson, G. Michael Zbaraschuk, Thomas J. J. Altizer. 2014. Resurrecting the Death of God: The Origins, Influence, and Return of Radical Theology. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (See also Greer, 2014; footnote 47; p. 18).

Deism and the Early Enlightenment at the Worth Library. https://edwardworthlibrary.ie/exhibitions-at-the-worth/smaller-exhibitions/deism-and-the-early-enlightenment-at-the-worth-library/. Contains references and imaged selections from key works.

Deschner, K. H. L. 1990-2013. Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity) 10 Volumes (link). Reinbek bei Hamburg, Germany: Rowohlt Verlag. (link; link); Archive.org German Vol. 10; abridged in English Vols. 1-3 and 1-3; 7 synopsis). This detailed history is monumental indeed, as praised (link), a very important contribution to the Enlightenment, comparable to contributions made by Pierre Bayle, Helvetius, or Voltaire:

• Volume 1: Die Frühzeit. Von den Ursprüngen im Alten Testament bis zum Tod des heiligen Augustinus (430). The Early Period. From Old Testament origins to the death of Saint Augustine (430).
• Volume 2: Die Spätantike. Late Antiquity. From the Catholic "children emperors" to the Extermination of the Arian [Christian] Vandals and Ostrogoths under Justinian I (527-565).
• Volume 3: Die Alte Kirche. The Ancient Church. Forgery, Brainwashing, Exploitation, Annihilation.
• Volume 4: Frühmittelalter. Early Middle Ages. From King Clovis (ca. 500) to the death of Charles 'the Great' (814).
  
• Volume 5: Das 9. und 10. Jahrhundert. 9th and 10th Centuries. From Louis the Pious (814) to the death of Otto III (1002).
  
• Volume 6: Das 11th and 12th Centuries. From Emperor Henry II 'the Holy' (1002) to the End of the Third Crusade (1192).
  
• Volume 7: Das 13. und 14. Jahrhundert. 13th and 14th Centuries. From Emperor Henry VI (1190) to the Death of Louis IV of Bavaria (1347).
  
• Volume 8: Das 15. und 16. Jahrhundert. The 15th and 16th century. From the exile of the popes in Avignon till the Peace Of Augsburg.
  
• Volume 9: Mitte des 16. bis Anfang des 18. Jahrhunderts. Middle of 16th century till beginning of 18th century. From Genocide in the New World till the beginning of the Enlightenment. This volume includes the American Holocaust (the updated casualty figures for which are a major demographic collapse of 95-114 million, see demographic research summarized in Stannard,1992, based on the many demographic researchers who did work in the 20th century on the data available from previous centuries, and records; cited below).  
  
• Volume 10: Jahrhundert und Ausblick auf die Folgezeit. 18th Century and Outlook onto the Aftermath. Kings by Grace of God and Decline of Papacy. This volume covers the end of European Christendom as such, and the long, gradual Enlightenment-based separation of church and state. As the next cited volume cited shows this process perforce continued until after World War II—i.e., the longest peace in Europe for >1000 years prior was between 1945 and the 1990s (broken by the Balkan conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, and then the wars for sovereignty against post-2014 coup Ukraine by the breakaway republics of the Donbass region: Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republic). 
  

____. 2013 (English). God and the Fascists: The Vatican Alliance with Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, and Pavelic. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. http://prometheusbooks.com/. With overwhelming documentation, this volume using primary sources makes its case. Professor Deschner has written several others books, dedicated to exposure of violations of values and to Enlightenment.

Diderot, Denis. 1713-1784. (Writing, 1746-1772). This site is dedicated to the writings and accomplishments of the great philosophe and editor of the Encyclopedie. http://www.denis-diderot.com/. 

The Digital Miscellanies Index searchable record of 1,600 poetic works from 1680 to 1800. http://digitalmiscellaniesindex.org/. More of the literary heritage of the Enlightenment era.

Dowd, M. 2007. Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion will Transform your Life and our World. New York, NY: Penguin Group.

Durant, W. 1926. The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Greatest Philosophers from Plato to John Dewey. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. A classic summary.

Early Modern Philosophy, Some texts from....(1620-1992), spanning the long 18th century Enlightenment era: https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/. Curates early modern philosophical and social commentary texts in PDF in original and translated versions, with select recordings of readings therefrom.  

Encyclopedie: ou, Dictionnaire Raisonne des Sciences, des Arts et des Metiers (1751-1765, 17 volumes, 1st edition), edited by Denis Diderot, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, &c.: The Online Books Page. https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book//lookupid?key=olbp74106; cf. https://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online, 1701-1800, ECCO. https://www.gale.com/primary-sources/eighteenth-century-collections-online.

Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker. http://benjaminpauley.net/c18booktracker/.

Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive, ECPA. https://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/. Containing >330 authors and >3300 works with both full text and high resolution digital facsimiles, as well as bibliographies and critical apparatus for literary analysis, the ECPA is a peer-reviewed online resource.  

Eighteenth-Century Resources, Jack Lynch, Rutgers University. https://jacklynch.net/18th/. 

English Poets of the Eighteenth Century, by Ernest Bernbaum, Gutenberg Project. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10161.

Enlightenment Deism. https://enlightenmentdeism.com/. An introduction to and some articles on the varieties of spirituality among the Enlightenment Deists in Europe and the Americas.

The Enlightenment Thinkers blog site. https://theenlightenmentthinkers.weebly.com/index.html.

Enlightenment & Revolution: 18th Century Online Encyclopedia. http://enlightenment-revolution.org/index.php/Main_Page.

Electronic Enlightenment, University of Oxford. http://www.e-enlightenment.com/. A project of the Voltaire Foundation for Enlightenment Studies (see below under Voltaire).

Euthyphro Dialogue (~380 BCE; link; MIT classics link). Among Plato's Dialogues, this dialogue has Socrates / Σωκράτης (~470-399 BCE) using the 'socratic questioning' method of teaching to devise a moral test, which we shall call the Euthyphro test of morality. The underlying questions: α–Do the gods set the standard for piety and morality? Or, β–Is there a universal morality to which even the gods are subject? In summary, the test unfolds thus in a story: (i) Socrates is charged in Athens for impiety, ἀσέβεια (the opposite of piety, εὐσέβεια), corrupting the minds of the youth, &c…. (ii) Euthyphro / Εὐθύφρων (‘right thinker’), a pious, zealous, wealthy Athenian prophet-diviner, prosecuting his own father for the manslaughter of a slave, despite family disapproval. (iii) Socrates (Socratic irony): ‘Euthyphro, you know the pious & the holy, τὸ ὅσιον, the impious & the unholy, τὸ ἀνόσιον. Teach me! What is piety?’ ‘Is the pious [action] loved by the gods because it is pious? Or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?’ (iv) Euthyphro repeatedly 5 times fails to find a non-contradictory definition of piety! {a—prosecuting father for manslaughter; b—what's pleasing to the gods; c—what all the gods love vs. what all the gods hate; d—as a part of justice; and finally, e—an art of sacrifice & prayer}. [He intuitively senses a universal morality but can’t distinguish it from piety]. (v) Socrates: ‘Are you not compelled to think that all that is pious is just?’ Euthyphro is now suddenly in a big hurry to go…. (vi) Socrates (ironic smile … across the millennia down to Voltaire's smile): ‘Alas! My friend… don’t leave me in despair. I want to learn more… I was hoping for help with my defense against charges of impiety!….’ Poor Socrates must now face death for impiety! (vii) The dialogue ends in ᾰ̓πορῐ́ᾱ—no explicit resolution—challenging the hearer and us. Comment. The pious, with their divine command theory of morality (DCTM), in the case of the Abrahamic religions based on the appropriated Hittite / Assyrian suzerain treaties' covenantal ingroup / out amorality (CIAO), have either ignored or long held this to be the ‘Euthyphro dilemma’! Of course, there is really no dilemma at all—there is indeed a universal morality in the very Nature of the Universe—above, beyond, & prior to all the religions and all the gods. It's embedded in the most successful strategies of cooperation in our very DNA by evolution. Socrates of course knew nothing of that, but if there was an ancient who could suspect something along that line, he's one of a small handful who might well have anticipated in the 'Ionian Dawn' Greek Enlightenment (Arthur Koestler's term), a universal natural morality. The problem with those who see a 'dilemma' is that, like Euthyphro they confuse morality (which must needs be universal) with piety (which must needs be simply provincial religious taboos—often quite divorced from morality). That's the root of many modern conflicts and crosscurrents in the post-Enlightenment era, including the root of ongoing religious violence especially in the not-very-old three Abrahamic religions.
    Further Note. It is important to observe that the universal morality in the very Nature of the Universe itself is not beyond one conception of the divine: Namely, the God or Universe / Deus sive Natura / Unconditioned, &c., which is not 'a being among beings' but rather beyond existence and non-existence, being and nonbeing, from which all conditioned existents / beings arise and into which they subside. In this case, the universal morality of the Universe is within / in the very Nature of that Unconditioned, that Deus sive Natura, Being / Nonbeing, &c., and not prior thereto. In this case, the Euthyphro dialogue comprises no 'dilemma' and therefore, it is plainly evident that of the gods of human endeavor, invention, conception, and intellectual and religious history, almost not all if any of those named with capital letters or missing vowels or 'sacred names' correspond to that unified Reality.
    For more on a worthy exception for a truer conception of the divine, see the entries on 'Christian Universalism' referenced under J. W. Hanson and D. B. Hart, namely, the note in proof on the 'ontological status of universalism.' For contrast and affirmation in human conceptions of the divine, see in our history of cosmology, chapter I. From Mythos to Cosmos: World-views from the Paleolithic through the (Aristarchan-)Copernican Revolution to Willem de Sitter (3.3 Mya to the 20th century) and chapter II. The Enlightenment: Ontology of the Divine (mid-17th - 18th centuries).

Fanon, Frantz Omar 1925-1961. 1952. Peau Noire, Masques Blancs, i.e., Black Skin, White Masks (PDF). 1967 transl. by C. L. Markmann. London, UK: Pluto Press. Description: "First published in 1952, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is one of the most important anti-colonial works of the post-war period. It is both a profound critique of the conscious and unconscious ways in which colonialism brutalises the colonised, and a passionate cry from deep within a black body alienated by the colonial system and in search of liberation from it" (link; italics added). In his short life, Frantz Fanon, an intellectual in the struggle for Algerian liberation and against colonialism everywhere, became one of the most farsighted and revolutionary of the purveyors of Enlightened, liberated thought. See the Caribbean Anti-Colonial Thought Archive Project. cf. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frantz-fanon/. 

____. 1959. L’An V de la Révolution Algérienne, i.e., A Dying Colonialism (PDF). 1965 transl. by H. Chevalier. New York, NY: Grove Press. Description: "An incisive and illuminating account of how, during the Algerian Revolution, the people of Algeria changed centuries-old cultural patterns and embraced certain ancient cultural practices long derided by their colonialist oppressors as primitive, in order to destroy those same oppressors. Fanon uses the fifth year of the Algerian Revolution as a point of departure for an explication of the inevitable dynamics of colonial oppression" (link).

____. 1961. Les Damnés de la Terre, i.e., The Wretched of the Earth (PDF; Note: more accurately, The Damned....). 1963 transl. by C. Farrington. New York, NY: Grove Press. Description: "Frantz Fanon’s seminal work on the trauma of colonization, 'The Wretched of the Earth' made him the leading anti-colonialist thinker of the twentieth century. Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence from French colonial rule and first published in 1961, Frantz Fanon’s classic text has provided inspiration for anti-colonial movements ever since, analysing the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for freedom." (link; italics added). This version contained a Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, a brilliant, lyrical panegyric to Fanon's oeuvre. Fanon removed this in later printings precisely because Sartre did not see as far or as clearly as Fanon did that the dark fate befalling indigenous Palestine was the same as resulting from colonialism everywhere: cf. Wolfe (2006), "Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native," (https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240) cited below.

____. 1964. Pour la Revolution Africaine, i.e., Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays (PDF). 1967 trans. by H. Chevalier. New York, NY: Grove Press. Description: "This powerful collection of articles, essays, and letters spans the period between Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon’s landmark manifesto on the psychology of the colonized and the means of empowerment necessary for their liberation. These pieces display the genesis of some of Fanon’s greatest ideas—ideas that became so vital to the leaders of the American civil rights movement" (link; italics added).

____. 2015. Écrits sur l’Aliénation et la Liberté, i.e., Alienation and Freedom (PDF). Edited & compiled by J. Khalfa & R.J.C. Young. 2018 trans. by S. Corcoran. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, Publishing. Description: "Alienation and Freedom collects together unpublished works comprising around half of his entire output—which were previously inaccessible or thought to be lost. This book introduces audiences to a new Fanon, a more personal Fanon and one whose literary and psychiatric works, in particular, take centre stage" (link; italics added). The influence of existentialism is seen in the editors' choice of title.

Freeman, C. 2005. The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason. New York, NY: Random House, Vintage.

Freneau, Philip Morin. 1752-1832. Radical poet of the American Revolution: Poems of Freneau: Edited with a critical introduction by Harry Hayden Clark. cf. https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/13400422; https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/philip-freneau.

Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore. 1996-present (World Wide Web edition). Mare Kõiva & Andres Kuperjanov (eds.). Folk Belief and Media Group of Estonian Literary Museum. Estonian Folklore Institute; (c) Institute of Estonian Language. https://www.folklore.ee/folklore/.

Gay, P. 1966. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, The Rise of Modern Paganism. New York, NY: Alfred Knopf.

____. 1966. The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom. New York, NY: Alfred Knopf.

____. 1968. Deism: An Anthology. New York, NY: Van Nostrand.

Genocide Convention: Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (link) by UN General Assembly Resolution 260 A (III); 09 December 1948, in Articles I-XVIII, including definition and punishable acts as provided for in
Article II 'Definition' [emphasis added]: "In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

• (a) Killing members of the group;
• (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
  

Article III 'Punishable Acts of Genocide' [emphasis added]: "The following acts shall be punishable:

• (a) Genocide;
• (b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
• (c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
• (d) Attempt to commit genocide;
• (e) Complicity in genocide."

The word 'genocide' (from Greek prefix, γένος- 'race' 'category' of people and Latin suffix, -caedo 'act of killing'; link) was coined by Polish emigre scholar-attorney Rafael Lemkin (1900-1959; https://www.unhcr.org/ceu/9486-lemkin-raphael.html) in his 1944 book (link), Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. (Publications for the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, Division of International Law, Washington, DC); New York, NY: Columbia University Press; pp. xxxviii, 674 (reflink). In this volume, written before the world had learned of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Treblinka, Mathausen, &c., Lemkin as an international jurist in his research analyzed how the Third Reich decrees imposed in occupied countries seemed deliberately calculated with 'intent to destroy' the 'non-Aryan' populations in the occupied countries (~20). In his case study of occupied Poland, Lemkin showed how the Nazis initiated five policies with intent to destroy the Polish population. The same genocidal legal apparatus was applied to Slavic peoples in Axis-occupied areas, including among the peoples of the Soviet Union under Nazi occupation. See Kiernan, B., Lower, W., Naimark, N., Straus, S. 2023. 15: The Nazis and the Slavs - Poles and Soviet Prisoners of War {e.g., the ~3.3 million Soviet POWs killed in Nazi custody}. In Kiernan, B., Lower, W., Naimark, No., Straus, S. (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Genocide. Vol. 3: Genocide in the Contemporary Era, 1914-2020. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, University Printing House. pp. 368-369. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118. Lemkin's analysis of these 5 specific Nazi policies became the 5 specific aspects of the definition adopted in the Genocide Convention under Article II above. Lemkin's farsighted scholarship and perception aids us in understanding the magnitude of the Nazi Holocaust in practice between 1939 and 1945 as not only as mass murders targeting the Jews and the Roma, but unfolding also in the deaths of tens of millions of Slavic peoples and other peoples in Axis-occupied countries during the Second World War.
     Two days later on 11 December 1948, another UN General Assembly Resolution elaborated on the definition of genocide, and recognized the cost to humankind of the recurring crime of genocide in human history [emphasis added]:

• "Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings; such denial of the right of existence shocks the conscience of mankind, results in great losses to humanity in the form of cultural and other contributions represented by these human groups, and is contrary to moral law and the spirit and aims of the United Nations. Many instances of such crimes of genocide have occurred when racial, religious, political, and other groups have been destroyed, entirely or in part." —UN General Assembly Resolution 96(1).

Of ongoing importance post-1945 have been the multiple cases of crimes of genocide (whether rapid-paced as in Rwanda, April-July 1994, or slow-paced by attrition as in the government-funded, church-run Indian Residential Schools in Canada, 1876-1997, or in the destruction and ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples from their lands on various continents over even recent decades; &c.). These have occurred since or are still unfolding, meaning that there are still possibilities of prevention to save the remnants of the targeted populations, and not only to bear witness: See the ongoing immediate reports bearing witness by the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor: https://euromedmonitor.org/en, along with investigative journalism and podcast on Palestine: https://electronicintifada.net/. On the legal petition, under the Genocide Convention, brought by the Republic of South Africa in defense of the besieged, bombarded, and desolated people of Palestine in Gaza (before and since the militant attack of 07 October 2023) to the International Court of Justice (https://icj-cij.org/home): An 84 page legal indictment thoroughly annotated and documented with 574 footnotes (submitted to ICJ on 28 December 2023), illustrating how a decades-long, slow-paced genocide has become a rapid-paced genocide: https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20231228-app-01-00-en.pdf. See journalist Owen Jones' summary discussion (03 January 2024): Video link. Bearing witness from the ground with Eye on Palestine: https://t.me/eyeonpal.

• International Court of Justice (ICJ), The Hague (Thursday, 11 January 2024): Day 1 of the proceedings of the Republic of South Africa's case under the Genocide Convention against Israel's war upon Palestine in Gaza: Day 1 coverage.
• ICJ, The Hague (Friday, 12 January 2024): Day 2 of the proceedings of the Republic of South Africa's case under the Genocide Convention against Israel's war upon Palestine in Gaza, featuring Israel's defense: Day 2 coverage. 
  
• ICJ findings & rulings, The Hague (Friday, 26 January 2024: Day 3 coverage): https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240126-ord-01-00-en.pdf, (cf. https://theintercept.com/2024/01/26/icj-ruling-gaza-genocide/). In a 29 page order with a series of findings / recollections, and orders for 'provisional measures,' the Court found that both parties were signatories of the Genocide Convention and thus had undertaken obligations "to prevent and to punish" the crime of genocide, that Palestinians are a distinct existing 'a national, ethnical, racial or religious group' with protections under the Genocide Convention (contrary to what Hannah Arendt could have called a 'banality of evil'-type genocidal falsehood of there being so such thing as the Palestinian people, i.e., denial of Palestine and Palestinians), found evidence of Israeli genocidal intent and incitement in the South African brief, among others of the total 86 findings, and that therefore (usually with judges voting 15 to 2 and 16 to 1), the ICJ found in favor of South Africa and against Israel (although skirting the issue of a ceasefire, showing that an increasingly vanishing remnant of criminal impunity for the Tel Aviv regime still persists). The ICJ ordered the following 'provisional measures' (emphasis added):
• (1) Judges order by 15 to 2 that "Israel shall take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts [(a), (b), (c), & (d) cited] within the scope of Article II of this Convention" (Two odd 'nay' votes to measures of a signatory state to comply with the Genocide Convention): 
• (a) Killing members of the group;
  
• (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
  
• (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• (d) Imposing measures to prevent births within the group.
  
• (2) Judges order by 15 to 2 that "Israel shall take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip" (The reflexively, always-dissenting Uganda Judge Julia Sebutinde and unsurprisingly, Israeli ad hoc Judge Barak, who in his separate opinion strangely and irrelevantly signals using religious, covenantal ingroup v outgroup biblical references, irrelevantly wanders to the Nazi Holocaust during WWII, and then returns to task to make apologetic excuses for the Tel Aviv regime. Even ad hoc Judge Barak on rare occasion joins the Court majority, but never curiously, Judge Sebutinde).
  
• (3) Judges order by 16 to 1 that "Israel shall take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip." (Judge Sebutinde's bizarre 'nay' vote against an order for Israel to abide by the Genocide Convention itself comprises complicity).
  
• (4) Judges order by 16 to 1 that "Israel shall take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip" (Judge Sebutinde's weirdly votes 'nay' to immediate humanitarian aid comprises for Palestinians in Gaza, again signaling support for and complicity in genocide).
• (5) Judges order by 15 to 2 that "Israel shall take effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts within the scope of Article II and Article III of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide against members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip." (Both Judge Sebutinde and ad hoc Judge Barak in a curious anti-Genocide Convention move, vote 'nay' to prevent destruction of evidence and enjoin preservation evidence related to allegations of genocide! (Why even serve on a Court instituted in part to uphold the Genocide Convention when they are apologists for, take actions to aid and abet, and to cover up plausible acts of genocide? It is absurd and ridiculous, and in the Enlightenment tradition of Voltaire, these 'nay' votes deserve to be laughed to scorn).
  
• (6) Judges order by 15 to 2 that "Israel shall submit a report to the Court on all measures taken to give effect to this Order within one month as from the date of this Order" (Again, the two out-of-place anti-Genocide Convention anti-compliance judges' vote 'nay').

The President of South Africa's powerful response welcoming the ICJ ruling (26 January 2024): videolink. On the 1st of February, representatives of South Africa held a press conference, where Minister of International Relations and Cooperation the very eminent Naledi Pandor presided: "South Africa Holds Media Briefing on Israel, Pose a Big Question At the End!" (videolink), whom one commentator aptly hailed as "a symbol of the Renaissance of African Humanism." Since the ICJ ruling (01 February 2024), journalist Owen Jones has brought to public light in a report, "This PROVES Israel Violating Genocide Convention - And Defying ICJ Orders" (videolink) from the voluminous record of genocidal content posted by IDF members on social media, including Tiktok, some highly damning evidence, with high command commendation and support (both military command and from including from the supreme civilian commander and head of government, Israeli Prime Minister B. Netanyahu [28 October 2023, statement link; videolink; not to mention, head of state, President Herzog in agreement that 'we' are fighting 'human animals' and that 'there are no uninvolved civilians,'], citing the genocidal biblical commands "in our holy bible' to exterminate Amalek [men, women, children, babies, and their livestock: 'Remember what Amalek did to you' (Deuteronomy 25:17) ], the example of 'Yehoshua ben Nun" ('Joshua son of Nun,' book of Joshua), &c., for direct violations of the Genocide Convention, Art. III in the crimes of (a) genocide, (b) conspiracy to commit genocide, (c) direct and public incitement to commit genocide, (d) attempt to commit genocide, and (e) complicity in genocide; (despite even Israeli law 5710-1950, incorporating the language of the Genocide Convention making its violation a capital offense, i.e., the law under which former German Nazi SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann could have been tried and executed in Israel in 1961-1962, the same Eichmann who had worked with Zionists on the 'transfer agreement' ethnic cleansing of Jews from Germany as a prelude to the Holocaust). French-speaking IDF soldiers and their captain, (among the multitude of genocidal content posted on social media and collected by Younis Tirawi @ytirawi), posted a video riding in a tank where he stated in a crazed frenzy:

• "Here is Captain Loupy. He will take you to Gaza. This is going to suck. It will be great. We are going to massacre them, massacre them. So here we go. We will continue with the tank. Come on, here we go, here we go... here we go." [music blaring in the background; while troops are riding on a tank toward Gaza].
  

The IDF has awarded this captain an honor certificate (Tiktok @looping2618). Another example of IDF complicity in genocide directly cites PM Netanyahu's twice citing the genocidal biblical commands against Amalek in his social media post, and despite apologists for the Tel Aviv regime was understood by this IDF Tiktokker (Kapwing @ireallyhateyou) as referring to the Palestinians in Gaza:

• "I am now leaving Khan Younis with mixed emotions. On the one hand we are filled with great joy - no longer in the era of pogroms that slaughtered, tortured, and abused us without response. Blessed be the Lord, we have destroyed a vast territory, killed tens of thousands of the Amalek[im]. On the other hand, we have not yet become a moral army, and that is the true war facing the people of Israel. The rest will fall into place easily once we understand morally that every Arab [Palestinian] is a suspicious entity. Perhaps he is good, perhaps he's a bomb. But he is suspect. To be moral is to execute all the terrorists after investigating them. To be moral is to conquer and flatten all parts of the land of Israel. Any place we leave a hornets' nest untouched will retaliate. Understanding this saves lives. We must grasp this in our minds before the enemy explains it to us with blood, god forbid, against us sooner or later. Good luck to all of us, to the people of Israel in this grand and crucial battle." This same bible-citing soldier has also earlier posted: "What do we do according to the Torah? If a damn Hamasnik, lays down its weapons and runs away? Jacob our father blesses Yehuda in the Parasha: '...your hand is in the back of your enemies. When is Judah's hand' in [... the back of your enemies?]'," (cf. בְּעֹ֣רֶף in Gen. 49:8), you have to kill the enemy anyway. Comment: We hope that such sentiments become more rare with time, and a new dawning of universal morality and solidarity grows.

As Israeli forces were moving against Rafah in the south of Gaza, the Republic of South Africa on 12 February 2024 submitted an urgent request letter for additional measures in the case to the ICJ under Article 75(1) of the Genocide Convention, noting that Rafah is home to about 280,000 Palestinians, and now has ~1.4 million Palestinians there, half of whom are children. On 15 February 2024, the State of Israel submitted observations disputing the urgent request.

• International Court of Justice (ICJ), The Hague, noting South Africa's letter and Israel's observations, issued its decision (Friday, 16 February 2024; emphasis added):
• (1) The Court notes "that the recent developments in Gaza, and in Rafah in particular, 'would exponentially increase what is already a humanitarian nightmare with untold regional consequences’, as stated by the United Nations Secretary-General (Remarks to the General Assembly on priorities for 2024 (7 Feb. 2024))."
• (2) States "This perilous situation demands immediate and effective implementation of the provisional measures indicated by the Court in its Order of 26 January 2024, which are applicable throughout the Gaza Strip, including in Rafah, and does not demand the indication of additional provisional measures."
• (3) "The Court emphasizes that the State of Israel remains bound to fully comply with its obligations under the Genocide Convention and with the said Order, including by ensuring the safety and security of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip."
  
• ICJ decision ends with a review of the history of the proceedings.

On 27 March 2024, UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967, Francesca Al released a 25 page, heavily footnoted document to the Human Rights Council entitled, "Anatomy of a Genocide" which laid out the case that there are reasonable grounds that a genocide is being committed against Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli state. A press conference was held to accompany the submission of the report.    

Gibbon, Edward. 1776-1789. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (6 volumes, multiple editions). Strand, London: Strahan & Cadell. Although much has been learned since, and like all works they may be critiqued, these volumes voluminously trace the darkening history of the West with the onset of religious hegemony against the backdrop of Greco-Roman classical antiquity and its more cosmopolitan toleration, from an Enlightenment perspective. Online: https://archive.org/details/historyofdeclinex01gibb.  

Gottlieb, A. 2016. The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy. New York, NY / London, UK: W. W. Norton, Liveright. This volume follows the story of key figures of the Enlightenment era vs 'the kingdome of darknesse,' life times of 17th & 18th century thinkers chart, the fresh start with Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Bayle, Leibniz, Hume, and 'what has the Enlightenment ever done for us?' on Voltaire, Rousseau and the philosophes.

_____. 2016; 2019. The Dream of Reason (New edition[, 2019]): A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance (2nd edition, 2016). New York, NY / London, UK: W. W. Norton. This history starts with the early 'archetypal' Milesians (what Koestler would call the 'Ionian Dawn'), the Pythagoreans, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zeno, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus, the Sophists, Socrates and the Socratics, Plato, Aristotle the master, the paths for seekers for tranquility, Epicureans, Stoics, and Sceptics, the piety of the Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and the rediscovery of the Renaissance.

Gould, R. R. 2023. Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom. Verso Trade. This British scholar explores how the IHRA (Int'l Holocaust Remembrance Assoc.) definition of anti-semitism is being used to erase both Palestinian freedom and free speech of others around the world, leading to suppression of free expression in Britain, and elsewhere. We might add that the IHRA definition of anti-semitism is itself anti-semitic because it stereotypes Jewish identity by equating it with zionism and the zionist state. Most of all, the IHRA definition is weaponized and complicit in the colonization, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of Palestine. As such, the IHRA definition is counter-Enlightenment and pro-imperial, pro-colonial elimination of the native (Wolfe, 2006; referenced below).

Greenblatt, S. 2011. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York, NY / London, UK: W. W. Norton. On the transmission of the 1st century BCE Epicurean Roman poet Lucretius' poem De Rerum Natura to some radicals in the Renaissance and its influence on the Enlightenment and the making of modernity.

Greenstein, T. 2022. Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation. London, UK: New Generation Publishing. This volume faces the history of collaboration between Zionism and the various forms of anti-Semitism in the modern era, including during the dark days of World War II. It is a part of a growing body of scholarship on this and kindred topics. Cf. Brenner, 1983; 2002 cited above.

Greer, L. 2014. From theodicy to anthropodicy: A reflection on ... 'divine action and the argument from neglect,' free PDF. Chapter 3 in Walters, J., Clayton, P., Knapp, S. (eds.). 2014; [2020 hardcover], Confronting the Predicament of Belief. Eugene OR: Wipf and Stock; which in this chapter is a thorough critique of the theodicy in ch. 3 of Philip Clayton & Steven Knapp's (2011) apologetic, The Predicament of Belief: Science, Philosophy, Faith (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press). This 23 page paper (comprehensively footnoted) in critiquing the Clayton-Knapp theodicy, shows that they have followed Gottfried Leibnitz in his bid to construct a metaphysic / ontology to avoid Spinozism, or monism, in the framing of the God / World problem, and touches on how the nature-of-the-divine discussion in Enlightenment, modern, and post-modern considerations are central to the moral issues, as well as to free inquiry, in the spirit of the Greek Ionian Enlightenment and since. 

____. 2015. Reclaiming Jesus: A historical and bibliographic note on what came before Trinitarian orthodoxy. Journal of Biblical Unitarianism 2 (2), 2-39; free PDF; JBU format free PDF. This paper reviews the exegesis, the exegetical literature, and the history, including a section on historical data about how Unitarian Christians (earlier Arian and later Socinian) prepared the way for religious freedom and rediscovery of and building on the Greek foundations of an actual universal (non-tribal) moral ethic during the Enlightenment, in sharp relief and contrast with the traditional in-group / out-group (and divine command) ethics of the Abrahamic religions. It is to the credit of a growing number of scholars and practitioners in the Abrahamic religions that they are transcending these traditional ethics. This paper also summarizes in brief the historical chronology of the early Jesus and Christian movements in tabular form. In footnote 93, reference is made to early Jesus movement ossuaries, including from what has been called the "Patio tomb" and the "Talpiot tomb." One issue is the data for the provenance of the "'Ya'akov son of Yehosef brother of Yeshua' ossuary" or the "James ossuary" from the Talpiot tomb. In that note, I mentioned a then forthcoming paper by Aryeh Shimron arguing on elemental abundances analysis for further sedimentary elemental confirmation of the provenance of the James ossuary to the Talpiot tomb. Of interest to the history of the earliest Jesus movement is the subsequent release of this paper: Shimron et al. 2020. The geochemistry of intrusive sediment sampled from the 1st Century CE inscribed ossuaries of James and the Talpiot Tomb, Jerusalem. Archaeological Discovery 8 (1), 92-115. https://doi.org/10.4236/ad.2020.81006.

Hanson, J. W., D.D. 1899. Universalism the Prevailing Doctrine of the Christian Church during Its First Five Hundred Years (and showing the influence of Greek Mythology and pagan philosophy on Christian Doctrine). Boston, MA / Chicago, IL: Universalist Publishing House. https://www.tentmaker.org/books/Prevailing.html#129. This history by a Universalist reverend finds quotations and references in early patristic and Christian sources reflecting a universalist approach to Christian soteriology, and that theological and moral daring provides examples of some enlightened moral thought before the Enlightenment:


Hart, D. B. 2019. That All shall be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. From a tradition of patristic and other early universalists especially within the Eastern Orthodox Christianity of the early centuries, a metaphorical / allegorical approach to Scripture, and mining for the diamonds of a few universalist texts in the NT as understood by certain fathers such as Origen (c185-c253 CE) and Gregory of Nyssa (c335-c395 CE), combined with arguments from moral philosophy and philosophical theology, philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart (DBH) in a series of 4 essays argues that a real understanding of God and the NT kerygma must, if consistent or moral or valuing love above all else, entail not only universal salvation but an ἀποκατάστᾰσις (apokatastasis) or restoration / reconciliation of everything to its origin in unified Being, or in God, in the philosophical sense, if one wishes, and also in the sense of the theology of spiritual resurrection in I Cor. 15. This idea of ἀποκατάστᾰσις first was conceptualized in Greek Stoicism, and has been modified by others.
    In DBH's earlier pique in his hasty, reactionary, even rather counter-Enlightenment 2010 volume, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies (Ann Arbor, MI: Sheridan Books), a foray against the “new atheists" and their account of ecclesiastical history, he wrote a rather white-washed apologia for Christian history (cf. Deschner, K. H. L. 1990-2013. Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums / Criminal History of Christianity in 10 Volumes, and many other works) which contradicts some of his own critiques of dominant Christian theologies, and leaves out too much historical evidence. Ironically, in light of his later works on the philosophical understanding of God by the great theologians, he missed that Richard Dawkins' critique of “a supernatural being out there with a 7/10 chance of not existing,” while perhaps philosophically naïve, was indeed a rejection by Dawkins of the same idol that DBH rejects. Thankfully like the "new atheist" fad, DBH's Delusions is somewhat passé. 
    Ontological status of 'universalism' as a contribution to Enlightenment thought. From a philosophical and mathematical standpoint, and in recurrent historical memory, one might summarize how DBH's Christian 'universalism' is ultimately an ally of Enlightenment thus: Postulate that God is not “a being among beings” but rather the 'ground of being' or Being / Nonbeing itself, which does not exist, but is beyond essence and existence (Tillich), the Unconditioned necessary from which everything contingent arises (Buddhism, &c.), the substantial Natura naturans (Nature naturing) from which all modal Natura naturata (Nature[s] being natured) in Deus sive Natura emerge (Spinoza), &c., &c., and the Unified Infinity from which innumerable, differentiated infinities arise and back into which they subside—such that there is a 1 to 1 correspondence between every one of the contingent innumerable infinities and a corresponding point of the Undivided Infinity in Infinite Unity (cf. the proof in Cantorian set theory regarding cardinalities of infinity). Therefore, every contingent being reflects a unique facet of the undivided necessary infinite Being / Nonbeing, and not one is lost or can be lost without a loss to Being / Nonbeing. Since that undifferentiated, necessary Being / Nonbeing encompasses the highest ideal of love, love being among qualia existing, which it must of necessity do, and all that must exist, then no individual sentient being can be lost without diminishing the Undivided Infinity—which is a contradiction. QED. (See also in our history of cosmology, chapter II. The Enlightenment: Ontology of the Divine).

Hilberg, R. 1961, 1985, 2003. (Eventually 3 volumes). The Destruction of the European Jews. Quadrangle Books / Holmes & Meier / Yale University Press. The dean of Nazi Holocaust studies, Prof. Raul Hilberg has bravely faced criticism and vitriol from many quarters for his meticulous documentation of how and his assay to understand why the methodical, bureaucratic, and industrial attempted destruction of European Jewry took place under the Third Reich, resulting in the deaths of between 4.9 to 5.4 million. This venerable scholar is the only historian of the Holocaust, of those whom Claude Lanzmann interviewed, whose contributions made it into the final ~9 hour cinematographic classic, Shoah (1985): https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/shoah. 

History of the Eighteenth Century in Ten Poems, University of Oxford. http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/history-eighteenth-century-ten-poems.

Holmes, R. 2009. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. New York, NY: Vintage Books, a division of Random House (paperback). Holmes in this popular, widely-read work also stirred something deep in 18th century scholarship by recapturing via the medium of biographies exploring how the scientists of the "second scientific revolution" in what is considered the Romantic era, formed a unique historical interface of Romantic art / poetry along with their Romantic awe of science / wonder. 18th century scholars in response created a large common space for reflection and scholarship on this unearthed Enlightenment theme (referenced above): https://www.18thcenturycommon.org/about/. One section is specifically, a response of scholars to Holmes (2009): https://www.18thcenturycommon.org/collections/the-age-of-wonder/.

Horne, G. 2014. The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States. New York, NY: New York University Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/76132. Prof. Horne lays out data illustrative of how fear of slave revolution in the American colonies helped provide some of the motivation for the American Revolution, making it to a certain extent a counter-revolution, illustrative of moderate, in part, and even counter-Enlightenment fears and loathing of the egalitarian values of the Radical Enlightenment.

International Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS): https://oraprdnt.uqtr.uquebec.ca/pls/public/gscw031?owa_no_site=304.

International Humanitarian Law (IHL-databases) has the full complement of documents summarize the modern requirements in international law regarding the conduct of war, war crimes, military occupation, and all aspects of humanitarian law connected therewith. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is involved in hearing cases regarding this body of international law. Among the many cases before the Court is one entitled, "Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem" (ICJ link) which includes a multi-national request for an advisory opinion, along with verbatim and written statements submitted by many countries. A series of hearings were scheduled for 19-26 February 2024, broadcast on UN television on the first hearing, 19th, second hearing, 20th, third hearing, 21st, fourth hearing, 22nd, fifth hearing, 22nd, sixth hearing, 23rd, seventh hearing, 26th, and the eighth hearing, 26th.      

Israel, J. I. 2001. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. With this comprehensive volume, and the tomes produced over the next two decades, Jonathan Israel has certainly established himself as a premier historian of the Enlightenment, especially the contributions of the Radical Enlightenment, and the currents of conflict within the Enlightenments (Radical & moderate-conservative) and with the counter-Enlightenment circles. Especially this work is a seminal, paradigm-shifting tour de force in Enlightenment studies. List of Prof. Israel's publications: https://www.ias.edu/hs/israel/publications. 

____. 2005. Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1650-1752. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. This masterful volume deals with the contested crosscurrents of Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment thought and movements all the way through the crisis of religious authority in Early modern Europe, issues in political emancipation, intellectual emancipation, the Enlighteners as "the party of mankind," the Radical philosophes, to the first stage of the "war of the Encyclopedie" which was part of the Radical Enlightenment project of making the stores of human knowledge available to the people.

____. 2008. The Islamic world and the Radical Enlightenment: Toleration, freethinking, and personal liberty: https://www.ias.edu/ideas/2008/israel-islamic-world. This invited presentation discusses the influence and recognition by Radical Enlighteners in the epoch found interesting parallels with radical and enlightenment thought in the Islamic world, including the story of the monistic Islamic sage-martyr "Mehmet Effendi."

____. 2011. Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. In this next volume, JI traces from the next stage of the "war of the Encyclopedie" through debates about Nature and Providence after the 1755 Great Lisbon Earthquake, through controversies between the Radical philosophes and the moderates, as well as the anti-philosophes, and also discussion of Histoire philosophique, or overturning colonialism, the effect of Amerindians on Enlightenment thought, and the Enlightenment influence throughout the world, in a "remaking of the world," as it were. Of course, modern anti-colonialism is one of the legacies of the Radical Enlightenment, we may note.

____. 2011. A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. This delightful little volume discusses the Radical Enlightenment roots of modern democracy and its tensions, as well as the Enlightenment critique of war and the search for peace in the modern world. JI also contrasts the Enlightenments of Voltaire vs. Spinoza in philosophical systems. 

____. 2014. Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press & Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. In this voluminous intellectual defense of the French Revolution as the outcome of the Radical Enlightenment, JI traces the roots and the outcomes and reverberations, all the way to the Robspierrist reaction, before the Napoleonic demise of the French Revolution, at least politically, although the ideas themselves "spring eternal" as Alexander might have said.

____. 2017. Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775-1848. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Like Matthew Stewart, JI expounds on the Radical shockwaves which emerged from the American Revolution, acknowledging the problems associated with Native American expropriation and the need for Black emancipation, before the conservative turn in the 1790s toward party politics, and ultimately, of course "American exceptionalism" the "demise" of Radical Enlightenment, and the eventual dark road toward counter-Revolution and counter-Enlightenment, which have marked American foreign policy especially since 1945, with a few exceptional years, during the Kennedy Administration, we might add.

____. 2019. The Enlightenment that Failed: Ideas, Revolution, and Democratic Defeat, 1748-1830. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Starting with Radical Enlightenment and "modernity" and going all the way to the Left's "turn from Radical Enlightenment to Socialism" (mid-19th century), JI documents the history of Radical ideas and revolutions across the Western World, including significantly the ancient roots with the ancient Greeks, such as Epicureans (Lucretius), through the Radical Renaissance to the Radical Enlightenment. JI also responds to misunderstandings (such as that metaphysical "substance" monism inevitable leads to Radical political liberation, when in the case of La Mettrie and Goethe, it manifestly led to reactionary politics), as well as the charges of scholarly critics against the "Radical Enlightenment thesis" in Enlightenment studies. 

____. 2021. Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx. The Fight for a Secular World of Universal and Equal Rights. Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Here JI provides the service of expound on the major contributions of Jewish intellectuals in the development of the Enlightenment in western civilization. From the historical facts of long Jewish marginalization and ghettoization in Christendom, or Christian European civilization, and that the majority of the Jewish population of Europe were quiescent and submissive and very religious, there were key Jewish revolutionaries who rose in response to the need for Jewish emancipation, some of whom were figures in Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. 

____. 2023. Historical Dictionary of the Enlightenment. (2nd edition). Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Rowman & Littlefield. Part of the multi-volume Historical Dictionaries of Ancient Civilizations and Historical Eras (Woronoff, J. series editor), which began to be published in 2001. This 1-volume dictionary seeks to encompass the wide expanse and advances in Enlightenment studies and historiography. JI provides a wonderful chronology of the Enlightenment tabulated under major historical events, key books, and developments in the arts and sciences. The chronology starts with the 30 Years' War (1618-38) and Francis Bacon's Novum Organum (1620) and goes through the rest of the 17th, the long 18th century, and ends in 1830 with the series of revolutions which rocked Europe.

____. 2023. Spinoza: Life & Legacy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. An attempt at an exhaustive biography of this central radical Enlightener in the context of his life, his works, the intellectual and cultural and religious milieu within which he lived, and the other works he praised or attacked in his short, consequential life. Israel debates Steven Nadler, another biographer of Spinoza cited here too.

Jacobs, M. C. 1981; 2006. The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans. (2nd ed.). Lafayette, LA: Cornerstone Book Publishers. One of the early histories focusing on the Radical Enlightenment.

____. 2001. The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents. The Bedford Series in History and Culture. Boston, MA / New York, NY: Bedford / St. Martin's. A brief history with citations to many documents of interest. 

Jacoby, S. 2005. Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. New York, NY: Holt Paperbacks. This is a fine summary history of the role that Enlightenment freethinkers played in American progress, from the founding to recent times, often in league with religious (liberal and conservative) groups who shared some of the same moral vision which the freethinkers have often had. As reviewers have pointed out, Jacoby does not discuss the dark, amoral role of some faux 'libertarian' 'freethinkers' such as H. L. Mencken, Ayn Rand, and the neoconservatives such as Leo Strauss, Irving Kristol, &c., have had on American history and policies, which have been anti-Enlightenment and often more broadly, anti-moral also. See the reviewers' comments on the Amazon page for this volume.

James, C. L. R. (1901-1989); historian, playwright, poet. 1983, 1963, 1989, 2011 (editions). The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. London, UK: Secker & Warburg; New York, NY: Vintage / Random House; London, UK: Allison and Busby; London, UK: Penguin Books. The great leftist scholar, James, wrote the definitive history of the Haitian Revolution, its pure embrace of revolutionary Enlightenment values, the great Enlightenment revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture (1743-1803), and the intimate connection to the values espoused but never fully carried by the French Revolution. See also the C. L. R. James Archives of books and articles.

____. & Austin, D. (editors). 2009. You Don't Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C. L. R. James. (1967-1968). Chico, CA: AK Press. See an excerpt from the book. Seven previously unpublished lectures by James on topics ranging from Shakespeare to Rousseau, the Haitian Revolution, Caribbean history, Marx and Lenin (link).

Jenkins, P. 2012. Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can't Ignore the Bible's Violent Verses. San Francisco, CA: HarperOne. Another Christian thinker tackles the problem of the genocidal and violent passages in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic holy books, and some history of hermeneutics and interpretation. This book is an illustration of religious thought approaching issues in religious morality in the light of the legacy of the Enlightenment.

Khalidi, R. 2020. The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Company. Using the analytic tool of settler colonialism and the wars of elimination of the native (Wolfe, 2006 cited below), Palestinian scholar Prof. Rashid Khalidi traces the many stages in the long war against indigenous Palestine from the WWI era up nearly until the 2018-2021, and the the 2023 stages. Prof. Khalidi has written other books on the important issues.

Kickenbird, K. 1987. Indians and the U.S. Constitution: A Forgotten Legacy. Kirke & Lynn Kickenbird: Institute for the Development of Indian Law. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL16794951M/Indians_and_the_U.S._Constitution.

King, B. 2007. Evolving God: A Provocative View of the Origins of Religion. New York, NY: Doubleday. 

Kirsch, J. 2005. God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism. New York, NY: Viking Compass, Penguin Group.

Klever, W. 2009. Locke's disguised Spinozism. (Part 1). https://huenemanniac.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/lockes-disguised-spinozism.pdf.

____. 2011. Locke's disguised Spinozism. (Part 2). https://isidore.science/document/10670/1.l1qk0t. Although, Locke played the moderate Enlightener, underneath he was deeply invested in Radical Enlightenment, although not all of his contemporaries or modern historians, even such a dean of Enlightenment studies as Jonathan Israel seem to fully understand the well-disguised Radical Locke, who Klever has helped bring to historical light. 

Kraemer, J. L. 1984. Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam: A preliminary study. Journal of the American Oriental Society 104 (1), 135-164. Studies in Islam and the Ancient Near East Dedicated to Franz Rosenthal (Jan. - Mar., 1984). https://www.jstor.org/stable/602647.

____. 1986. Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.

Kramnick, I. 1995. The Portable Enlightenment Reader. (Portable Library). New York, NY: Penguin Books.

Kramnick, I. & Moore, R. L. 1996. The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness. New York, NY / London, UK: W. W. Norton & Company. The authors marshal historical evidence showing the secular Enlightenment foundations of the best in the foundational law and human rights which are expressed the ideals of the American republic. The historical reality as compared to the ideal has often been profoundly different.

Lanzmann, C. 1985. Shoah: The Complete Text of the Acclaimed Film (https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/shoah). Preface by Simone de Beauvoir. https://en.claude-lanzmann.com/. Taking the oral histories of the darkness of the Nazi Holocaust, Lanzmann, a young French collaborator of the existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir during the resistance (WWII) and thereafter in the fight for Algerian independence, while ironically supporting Israel which involved the colonial oppression, displacement, and dispossession of the Palestinian people. Like Lanzmann, Sartre also had a blind spot in his anti-colonial stance regarding Palestine (link). Despite these issues of consistency, Lanzmann's ~9 hour film is not only a testament to oral history cinematography, but also to the human spirit such that its universal, existential feel of memory makes Shoah (1985) deserving of the UNESCO heritage recognition it has earned.

Legacies of the Enlightenment: How the Enlightenment shapes our contemporary world in philosophy, political and social arenas, epistemology, science, questioning of authority, contemporary structures, and modern ecological trends such as climate change. This site includes curated research, multi-disciplinary sections, events, and teaching materials: https://www.enlightenmentlegacies.org/; migrated to a newer Humanity Commons site dealing with "Humanity, Nature, and Science in a changing climate": https://legaciesoftheenlightenment.hcommons.org/.

Locke, John. 1632-1704. Major publications during life: A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689); A Second Letter Concerning Toleration (1690); A Third Letter for Toleration (1692); Two Treatises on Government (1689/90); An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689/90); Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1689/90); The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695); A Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity (1695); select posthumous manuscripts: Questions Concerning the Law of Nature (1664); Essay Concerning Toleration (1667); Of the Conduct of the Understanding (1706); A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistelys of St. Paul to the Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, and Ephesians (1707). Online works of JL: https://archive.org/details/worksofjohnlocke01lock, https://thegreatthinkers.org/locke/major-works/; cf. The John Locke Institute https://www.johnlockeinstitute.com/.

The Long Eighteenth: That is, the long 18th century. https://long18th.wordpress.com/. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Lucretius Carus, Titus. c99 - c55 BCE. De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of the Universe). Probably the most influential radical philosophy document emerging during the Renaissance and influencing the Radical Enlightenment, and indirectly the moderate Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment reactions. The apparent first English translation was made in verse by Lucy Hutchinson (1618-1681): de Quehen (editor). 1997. Lucy Hutchinson's Translation of Lucretius: De Rerum Natura. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Thomas Creech's 1714 translation in rhyming iambic pentameter, a facsimile of the copy in John Adams' library: https://archive.org/details/tlucretiuscaruso01lucr/page/n5/mode/2up.

Makdisi, G. 1989. Humanism and scholasticism in Classical Islam and the Christian West. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 179ff.

_____. 1990. The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press.

Masalha, N. 1999; 2018. Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History. London, UK: Zed Books (2018 edition); in PDF at archive.org/. A Palestinian scholar and historian, Masalha documents from ancient texts how the land of Palestine (along with the original versions of its name) has always been an ancient land together with its people of multiple cultures and religions both who and which have a persisting identity going back millennia, despite later biblical mythology, and the recent destructive effects of the Palestine-Israeli conflict since the mid-20th century. He has written several other books and is the editor of a multidisciplinary Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies: https://www.euppublishing.com/toc/hlps/current.

McMahon, D. M. 2001. Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. A survey of the forces of counter-Enlightenment in France, from the reaction of l'ancien regime both in church establishment and in state and hereditary privilege who loathed and feared the prospective upheaval of a world shaped by the values of Christendom should the values of the philosophes prevail. This is their story and the role played in shaping the conflicts and contradictions of modernity by those counter-Enlightenment figures during 'the century blinded by light' (chapter 1). 

Morais, Herbert M. 1934. 1960 (2nd edition). Deism in Eighteenth Century America. New York, NY: Columbia University Press / London, UK: King & Son. https://archive.org/details/deismineighteent0000herb/page/n5/mode/2up; New York, NY: Russell & Russell (link). Compare Vernon E. Mattson. 1965 MS Thesis. American Deism in the Eighteenth Century at North Texas State University (full text): https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc699557/m1/.

Morris, B. 1988. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Morris is an Israeli historian who has examined documents in the Israeli state archives, and has found documents which are primary source witnesses to al Nakba, the forced and violent expulsion and dispossession of ~750,000 or more Palestinians from their homes and lands in those founding years, although he has been critiqued for bias and soft-pedaling the crimes of Israel / Zionists against indigenous Palestine during this period, which he denies doing. Although he does indeed condemn the massacres and rapes as war crimes which occurred during the Nakba, he justifies the expulsions as necessary for Israelis (link), but in recent years has signed a letter agreeing that what Israel is doing to the Palestinians is apartheid. Although more conservative, Morris considers himself to be among Israel's "New Historians" (link), who challenge the official views, including Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappé, both also referenced in this bibliography.  

Miller, R. J. 2015. American Indian Constitutions and their influence on the United States Constitution. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 159 (1), 32-56. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24640169. The influence of American Indian federal democracy on US representative federalism has also been acknowledged by the US Senate in 1988: https://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/hconres331.pdf.

The Mythvision Podcast. 2018-present. Derek Lambert, in the tradition of Enlightenment historical criticism, hosts a podcast where he interviews and makes documentaries based on the work of academic scholars in the history and development of religion, particularly of the Abrahamic religions and their evolution from ancient Near Eastern myth and milieu. https://mythvisionpodcast.com/; cf. podcast video channel.

Nadler, S. 2001. Reprint edition. Spinoza: A Life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. This is the first complete biography of the Dutch Radical philosopher. Nadler and Jonathan Israel have an ongoing debate about Spinoza.

Neville, R. C. 1992. God the Creator: On the Transcendence and Presence of God. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Neville makes his arguments in a sort of reflection with a number of philosophers and theologians, including Plato, Hegel, Leibniz, Tillich, Hartshorne, Whitehead, and so on.

Noyer, G. K. 2015. Voltaire's Revolution: Writings from His Campaign to Free Laws from Religion. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Press. The great writer's play, satire, letter, and pamphlet war for religious and philosophical freedom, and against bigotry, tyranny, and persecution, &c., with the characteristic wit and erudition of the great philosophe mustered to defend the cause of freedom.

Nixey, C. 2019. The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. London, UK: Pan MacMillan, Pan Books.

O’Donnell, J. J. 2016. Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity. New York, NY: HarperCollins, Ecco.

Old books illustrations, a resource for finding such. https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/.  

Paine, Thomas (1737-1809). [2003, 200th Anniversary Edition]. Common Sense [1776], Rights of Man [1791], and other Essential Writings of Thomas Paine. New York, NY: Signet Classics, Penguin Group. One of the most influential Radical political philosophers of late 18th century and of the American Enlightenment, who advocated a revolution in religion as well as abolition, and a social safety net. The Gutenburg compilation of the writings of Paine (2010): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/31270/31270-h/31270-h.htm.

Pappé, I. 2006. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. London, UK: OneWorld Publications. Israeli scholar and historian whose works include this epochal work, as well as other important works. He is one of the Israeli "new historians." http://ilanpappe.com/.

____. 2017. The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories. London, UK: OneWorld Publications. https://oneworld-publications.com/work/the-biggest-prison-on-earth/.

Pearson, R. 2005. Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Peled, M. 2016. The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine (2nd edition). Charlottesville, VA: Just World Books: https://justworldbooks.com/. The son of a prominent Israeli general, who came to believe after the 1967 war that a settlement with the Palestinians should be reached. Miko tells of his own journey and his own arrival at the just destination for an undivided Palestine, where there is equal rights whether one is Jewish, Christian, or Islamic in personal faith and background.

Persistent Enlightenment blog. https://persistentenlightenment.com/. This blog discusses the Enlightenment both "as Historical Period and Continuing Project" and its critics.

Pope, Alexander. 1588-1744. Poet and surreptitious Radical Enlightener who managed to mock, satirize, and enlighten in heroic couplets, in a number of very major and influential works: https://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/authors/pers00012.shtml.

Porter, R. 2000. The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment. New York, NY / London, UK: WW Norton & Co. This volume focuses in detail on the British / English contributions to the transmission of the Enlightenment. It examines such luminaries as Newton, Locke, David Hartley, Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestly, Thomas Paine, Jeremy Bentham, Godwin, Wollstoncraft, as well as the publicizing work of Addison & Steele, Defoe, A. Pope, and others.  

Radwell, S. D. 2021. American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments hold the Secret to Healing our Nation. Austin, TX: Greenleaf Book Group Press. The conflict between the Radical Enlightenment and the moderate and conservative Enlightenment (and yes, counter-Enlightenment) continues to shape the American experiment.

Recent promotions of Enlightenment-influenced Deism. https://www.deism.com/; https://positivedeism.com/; https://newdeismpress.com/; https://moderndeist.org/. It is important to note that "natural religion" has a long history before the Enlightenment era.

Resendez, A. 2016. The Other Slavery: Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. Boston, MA / New York, NY: Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt: Mariner Books. A Native American scholar, in this National Book Award finalist and winner of the Bankcroft Prize book, has lifted the veil on the enslavement and trafficking of Indians as part of the Holocaust of the indigenous Americas after the Columbian invasions. 

Resources for 18th Century Studies across the Disciplines, long 18th century, 1660-1830; Kevin Berland, Penn State University. https://www.personal.psu.edu/special/C18/c18-l.htm. 

Restoration & the 18th Century, English literature by period, UC Santa Barbara. http://vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=2738.

Rethinking Enlightenment: Conference on Forgotten Women Writers of 18th Century France. http://houghton75.org/?event=rethinking-enlightenment-conference-on-forgotten-women-writers-of-eighteenth-century-france&event_date=2018-03-23.

Robertson, R. 2021. The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790. New York, NY: Harper. Showed that Enlightenment thought was not just about reason, but also about seeking the good life as a goal of Enlightened thought.

Romer, T. 2015. The Invention of God. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Traces the theogony and evolution of divine conceptualizations with Yahweh from among the gods in the Ancient Near East. This research examines archaeology, text, and historical development, and naturally has implications not only for Judaism, but also Christianity and Islam. This and kindred books may be set in the context of my chapter I. From Mythos to Cosmos: World-views from the Paleolithic through the (Aristarchan-)Copernican Revolution to Willem de Sitter (3.3 Mya to the early 20th century) in the history of cosmology website: https://enlightenmentlegacy.net/cosmos/.

Russell, B. 1945. A History of Western Philosophy. New York, NY / London, UK / &c.: Simon & Schuster, A Touchstone Book. This classic and very comprehensive history of western philosophy from the rise of Greek civilization before the Milesians (Arthur Koestler's 'Ionian Dawn') through Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Athens culturally, Anaxagoras, the Atomists, Protagoras, Socrates, the Spartan influence, sources of Plato's views, Plato's Utopia, theory of ideas, Plato's theory of immortality, Plato's cosmogony, knowledge and perception in Plato, Aristotle's Metaphysics, Aristotle's ethics, Aristotle's politics, Aristotle's logic, Aristotle's Physics, early Greek mathematics and astronomy, philosophy post-Aristotle, the Hellenistic world, Cynics & Sceptics, the Epicureans, Stoicism, the Roman Empire culturally, Plotinus, Catholic philosophy: Religious development of the Jews, Christianity during the first four centuries (CE), three doctors of the church, St. Augustine's philosophy & theology, the 5th & 6th centuries (CE), St. Benedict & Gregory the Great, the papacy in the Dark Ages, John the Scot / John Scotus Eriugena, ecclesiastical reform in the 11th century (CE), Mohammedan culture & philosophy, the 12th century (CE), the 13th century (CE), St. Thomas Aquinas, the Franciscan schoolmen, the eclipse of the papacy, modern philosophy: general characteristics, the Italian Renaissance, Machiavelli, Erasmus & More, Reformation & Counter-Reformation, the rise of science, Francis Bacon, Hobbes' Leviathan, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, philosophical liberalism, Locke's theory of knowledge, Locke's political philosophy, Locke's influence, Berkeley, Hume, the Romantic movement, Rousseau, Kant, currents of thought in the 19th century (CE), Hegel, Byron, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the utilitarians, Karl Marx, Bergson, William James, John Dewey, and the philosophy of logical analysis (founded by Frege and Russell himself). Being early mid-century this history does not go forward to include existentialism and other post-World War II developments in western philosophy.    

Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. New York, NY: Knopf Doubleday Publishing; Pantheon Books; 25th anniversary edition. London, UK: Penguin Classics. A Palestinian-American academic, literary critic, artist, and political activist, Prof. Said produced a classic in analysis of the Eurocentric views and patronizing attitudes toward Near Eastern Arab-Islamic culture, and their significance in the Palestine-Israeli conflict. Said has written many more books on the subject of Palestine.

____. 2000. My encounter with Sartre. London Review of Books 22 (11). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n11/edward-said/diary.

Salaita, S. 2015. Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. In the summer of 2014, Palestinian-American professor of American Indian studies, Steven Salaita, was fired from his tenured professorial chair because of his tweets critiquing the 2014 Israeli assault on the Palestinian people of Gaza. Ironies abound here with the silencing of indigenous peoples whether the non-vanishing people of Palestine or the denialism and silencing of the vanishing peoples left after the destruction of nations and tribes in the American Holocaust (1492-present). Genocide is the polar opposite of Enlightenment values. Prof. Salaita at the Center for Constitutional Rights: https://ccrjustice.org/professor-steven-salaita, with its fact sheet on his firing: https://ccrjustice.org/files/Salaita_Factsheet_1-29-15_0.pdf.

____. 2015 (October). The Review: Why I was fired. The Chronicle of Higher Education, (October 2015). https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-i-was-fired/. 

____. & Chávez, K. R. 2015. 'Uncivil Rites,' October 21, 2015. Journal of Civil and Human Rights 5, Palestine on the Air (2019), 116-127. https://doi.org/10.5406/jcivihumarigh.2019.0116. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jcivihumarigh.2019.0116.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1905-1980. 1943. L'Etre et le Neant: Essai d'Ontologie Phenomenologique. Gallimard. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. (Trans. H. E. Barnes). New York, NY: Washington Square Press. https://www.librairie-gallimard.com/livre/9782070293889-l-etre-et-le-neant-essai-d-ontologie-phenomenologique-jean-paul-sartre/. Jean-Paul Sartre was a leading French philosopher (a founder of existentialism), essayist, novelist, playwright, resistance fighter during WWII, and an outspoken activist of the 20th century. In October 1945, Sartre with Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty founded a monthly journal Les Temps Modernes, a journal of arts, literary criticism, and social commentary until it ceased in 2019. In 1964, he declined the Nobel Prize, writing an emphatic letter (link) to the Swedish Academy; https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1964/sartre/biographical/, exhibiting the terrifying power of choice, in that he agonized over whether the prize money should have been accepted to help with an anti-apartheid committee in London, but ultimately decided against (link): "a writer who adopts political, social, or literary positions must act only with the means that are his own—that is, the written word.... all the honours he may receive expose his readers to a pressure I do not consider desirable." Of the episode, he said, " But one cannot be asked on the other hand to renounce, for 250,000 crowns, principles which are not only one’s own, but are shared by all one’s comrades. That is what has made so painful for me both the awarding of the prize and the refusal of it I am obliged to make." French President General Charles de Gaulle famously ordered a pardon for Sartre after he was arrested for protests with the words, "You don't arrest Voltaire" (link). Sartre's phenomenological approach to human freedom is actually harmoniously complementary to Spinoza's ontological determinism (see reference and short discussion in the Appendix to Greer, 2014).

_____. We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939-1975. van den Hoven, A. (editor), & Aronson, R. (editor, introduction). New York, NY: New York Review Books Classics. van den Hoven is the founding executive editor of Sartre Studies International: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Existentialism and Contemporary Culture. https://sartre-studies.berghahnjournals.com/. 

Schweitzer, A. 1911. The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede. 2nd English ed. London, UK: Adam and Charles Black. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45422/45422-pdf.pdf. Schweitzer summarizes the efforts since the Enlightenment find the historical Jesus, which Enlightenment scholars felt sure would be far different than the orthodox Christian conceptions of the Christ. The historical Jesus was an apocalyptic who sought the radical justice of a just God. With the weight of critical Enlightenment scholarship, Schweitzer argues that "Soon after that comes Jesus, and in the knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him. Instead of bringing in the eschatological conditions, He has destroyed them. The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great Man, who was strong enough to think of Himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory and His reign." Schweitzer challenges his readers to follow such a example. Religious scholar James Tabor cites this moral challenge to us of Jesus' apocalyptic 'interim ethics' also cited by Irish Jesus scholar John Dominick Crossan: https://jamestabor.com/albert-schweitzer-and-a-thoroughly-apocalyptic-jesus-and-paul/ and videolink.

Shores, C. 2000-2023. Pirates & Revolutionaries research machinery. Academia publication blogspot of a philosophy faculty member: https://piratesandrevolutionaries.blogspot.com/. This blogspot is a wealth of information on aspects of the history of philosophy, including the Enlightenment era, and information on the contributions of Spinoza in the Radical Enlightenment (of interest to our website). 

Sisson, D. with T. Hartmann. 2014 [40th Anniversary Edition]. The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction—and What This Means Today. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Smith, M. S. 2002. The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (2nd edition). San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins. Origins of monotheism from polytheism and henotheism in the predecessor religions and developments in ancient Israel and Canaan / Palestine.

Spinoza, Benedict de. 1632-1677. Korte Verhandeling van God, de Mensch en Deszelvs Welstand (A Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being; c1660); Principia Philosophiae Cartesianae (1663); Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670, religious critique & pioneering work on the secular state and toleration); Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (1674; publ. post-humously 1677: his philosophical masterpiece); and Compendium Grammatices Linguae Hebraeae (1677). https://spinozaweb.org/; quite comprehensive Studiana Spinoziana with many links also to Enlightenment subjects https://capone.mtsu.edu/rbombard/RB/spinoza.new.html, with some links dated; French site Hyper-Spinoza http://hyperspinoza.caute.lautre.net/; https://home.kpn.nl/rudolf.meijer/spinoza/ not recently curated. Spinoza inaugurated the modern field of historical biblical criticism, among his many roles as a leader of the Radical Enlightenment.

Stace, W. T. 1920. A Critical History of Greek Philosophy. London, UK: MacMillan. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33411.

_____. 1948. Man against Darkness. The Atlantic Monthly (Sept. 1948). Boston, MA: The Atlantic Monthly. https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/archives/1948/09/182-3/132325401.pdf. (Religious apologetic replies in The Atlantic Monthly against Stace's 1948 essay include that of Canon Bernard Iddings Bell (Nov. 1948) of the Episcopal Church, of , and of Prof. Theodore M. Green (1949; Yale University), However, a far better response is Stace's own 1952 volume, Time and Eternity, cited and linked below). This essay was the most controversial part of a series on religion in the journal. Also published as an essay in 1967. Man Against Darkness and Other Essays. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Cherry, Conley, & Hirsch. 1974. (2nd edition). A Return to Vision. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin; Part 3: Toward Oneness, p. 212. Stace's famous essay combined with other essays on mysticism east and west, death, values in general and in democracy, culture of education, poetry, philosophy of science, science and ethics. I first read it in a literature anthology opposite C. S. Lewis, Paul Tillich, Matthew Arnold, Don Taleyesva, and others. Stace points out the revolution in cosmology as world-view of which he sees Galileo's setting aside of 'final purposes' for 'efficient causes' as a sharp revolutionary dividing event in Western thought. Comment: Galileo's endeavors are indeed an excellent turning point to mark the revolution, which of course, was following currents going back to the Epicureans at least in ancient Greek thought. Furthermore, the 'cosmic darkness' and 'icy winds of the universe' Stace heralded is intimately connected with God, the infinity / eternity of 'the negative divine,' so argues Stace (1952; cited below). In the first edition, Cherry, Conley, & Hirsch. 1971. (1st edition). A Return to Vision. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin], the editors on the back cover, showing the philosophical bent and openness of the times to face the great mysteries and dilemmas of human existence within this college anthology:

• "No solutions are offered here: no systems, no ideologies. The concerns of this text are human needs, human fears, and how human beings express. Why? To better perceive why we are where we are and why certain universal problems so perniciously defy solution. Once we perceive, we can respond and make sense of our experience."
  

_____. 1952. Time and Eternity: An Essay on the Philosophy of Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://archive.org/details/timeandeternitya008849mbp/page/n21/mode/2up. A strong discussion of the reality of God as emptiness, void, Nonbeing, and the 'divine negative' not only in modern philosophy (cf. Stace, 1948) but also in mystics in all the great religions, and even in classic theology.

Stannard, D. 1992. The American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. This classic history, in the light of updated demographic evidence, and finding roots in the theological ideologies and centuries of trauma of Old World Christendom under the Abrahamic religious traditions, outlines and documents how one of the largest genocidal holocausts in history unfolded in the demographic collapse and large-scale disappearance and near disappearance of hundreds of nations and tribes of Native Americans from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego: 95-114 million human beings lost and vanished. Stannard also deals with the issue of American Holocaust denial among scholars who (should) know better, as does Ward Churchill (1997, cited here also). 

Stark, T. 2011. The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals when it gets God Wrong (And Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide it). Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. Christian scholar writing to Christians begins an excellent historical and moral critique of Judeo-Christian scripture on issues of historicity, henotheism, human sacrifice, genocide, propaganda, apocalypticism, and authority debates. Valuable steps in helping to bring biblical criticism in the Enlightenment tradition to conservative theists. Makes a good companion to Barr (1984) referenced above. 

Stavrakopoulou, F. 2021. God: An Anatomy. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, Penguin Random House. Surveys the male anthropomorphisation and embodiment of Yahweh in the biblical tradition. This is an important reminder of these origins after the effects of Hellenistic influences such as Plato, Aristotle, Photinus, and so on tended to make the Judeo-Christian medieval conceptions of the divine more spiritual and unembodied. 

Stenudd, S. 2007. Cosmos of the Ancients: The Greek Philosophers on Myth and Cosmology. North Charleston, SC: BookSurge. Summarizes the mythos to cosmos transition in the early Greek Enlightenment. Referenced in chapter I. From Mythos to Cosmos in the history of cosmology: https://enlightenmentlegacy.net/cosmos/Cosmos.html.

Stewart, M. 2005. The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. In this delightful volume, Stewart explores the personal encounter between two 17th century greats of the early Enlightenment, polymath genius and courtier Gottfried Leibniz and the ostracized and enigmatic, solitary philosopher Benedict de Spinoza. In reconstructing this meeting in that November of yesteryear, he raises the foundational issue of metaphysics and ontology in philosophical world-view formation during that formative period: An ontological pluralism of Leibnitz' monadology (which ingeniously left space for God and traditional theology) versus the naturalistic monism developed in Spinoza's ontology of Deus sive Natura. (See the forthcoming chapter II. the Enlightenment: Ontology of the Divine in the history of cosmology). The importance of that foundational discussion is key in the ideological and theological currents and conflicts of our day since the Enlightenment.

____. 2014. Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. New York, NY: WW Norton. Explores how Radical Enlightenment philosophical monist conceptions of the God-Nature relationship with roots stretching back to the Greek Epicureans influenced radicalism in the founding of the American Republic. The roots of naturalistic ontological monism are explored further in the history of cosmology within chapter I. From Mythos to Cosmos: World-views from the Paleolithic through the Copernican Revolution to Willem de Sitter, as well as in the forthcoming chapter II. the Enlightenment: Ontology of the Divine. Another approach and thesis may be found in Waldman's 2008 study, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America, cited below.

Stroumsa, S. 1999. Freethinkers of Medieval Islam: Ibn Al-Rawāndī, Abū Bakr Al-Rāzī and Their Impact on Islamic Thought. Leiden, Netherlands; London, UK; Boston, MA: Brill. This book arising from a doctoral dissertation by a professor at Hebrew University contributes to the understanding of the Arab Islamic Enlightenment. https://iqbal.hypotheses.org/6671.

Sublette, C. 1994-present. The Nuclear Weapon Archive: A Guide to Nuclear Weapons. https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/. From the early days of the Internet, this archive has assembled information on nuclear arsenals in the world, many technical details, and the implications of the threat to our world.

Sunstein, C. R. 2006. The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution—And Why We Need It More Than Ever. New York, NY: Basic Books. The notion of universal rights which figured largely in the legacy of the Enlightenment has expanded to include not only rights of freedom of world-view, libertas philosophandi, rights of fair legal procedures, equality before law, and democratic freedoms, but also social freedoms and freedom from want. American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-1945) was a pioneer in this revolution. In the post-war years, the notion of human rights has much expanded in both social rights as well as political and civil rights. As a great British jurist put it, "Necessitous men are not free men." This is a continuation of social rights called for by both Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine among many others.    

Thomas Gray 1716-1771. Archive of the University of Oxford: Links on 18th century studies. http://enlightenment-revolution.org/index.php/Main_Page. Poetry Foundation: Thomas Gray.

Toland, John 1670-1722. 1714. Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland, on the Same Foot with All Other Nations, Containing also, A Defense of the Jews Against All vulgar Prejudices in all Countries. London: J. Roberts in Warwick-Lane. https://archive.org/details/reasonsfornatur00tolagoog/page/n4/mode/2up. Radical Enlightenment Spinozist and pantheist issued this important work promoting universal equality and Jewish emancipation, as part of the Enlightenment project.

Trimm, C. 2022. The Destruction of the Canaanites: God, Genocide, and Biblical Interpretation. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Another Christian apologist approaches the issue of prescribed genocide in the Tanakh applying what he sees as four possible hermeneutic approaches in reevaluating: (a) God is not good; (b) the 'Old Testament' is not a reliable record of God's actions; (c) the 'Old Testament' actually does not describe anything like genocide; and (d) the nature of violence in the 'Old Testament' concluding that the mass killing of the Canaanites was only permissible one time. This book shows to what moral lengths some religious apologists will go to justify their beliefs.

Universalism (Christian or otherwise) from Αποκατάστᾰσις (apokatastasis) or restoration / reconciliation of everything to God or the cosmic source, i.e., Universalism (Christian or otherwise; i.e., cf. Acts 3:21 building perhaps from Rom. 8:21, &c.; I Cor. 15). Just like the Copernican Revolution was a surpassing of an Earth-centric / anthropocentricity and a recovery in cosmology of the Aristarchan revolution of a Sun-centered celestial system or cosmology (see chapter I. Mythos to Cosmos: World-views from the Paleolithic through the {Aristarchan-}Copernican Revolution to Willem de Sitter (>3 Mya to early 20th century), so the Radical Enlightenment was the beginning of a recovery of a universal morality, a universal ethic, now instantiated in modern evolutionary biology / game theory of reciprocity / altruism (used to be called sociobiology but now evolutionary psychology). We can call this universeal because there is altruism beyond-kin altruism and the cooperation of symbionts, including endosymbionts (mitochondria from α-proteobacteria in eukaryotic cells & chloroplasts from cyanobacteria also in eukayrotes), of species in an ecosystem, and of ecosystems in a biosphere, &c., so the moral universal Copernican Revolution of the Radical Enlightenment was the start of a recovery of the universal ethics of the best among the ancient Greeks, and also it seems of elements in the Axial Age religions, Buddhism, &c., and also Axial descendants such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. One of the so-called Abrahamic religions, most notably Christianity, had early strands of universalism in their greatest thinkers, and some of the Christian thinkers have argued that there are roots in ancient Israelite religion as expressed in the Tanakh (תַּנַ״ךְ) or what the Christians call the 'Old Testament' (OT), but especially evident in the 27 booklets, perhaps more so those of Pauline, deutero-Pauline, and pseudo-Pauline provenance of the New Testament (NT) and early Jesus movement / Christian history. See more discussion and documentation under the two entries below for "Hanson, J. W., D.D. 1899. Universalism the Prevailing Doctrine of the Christian Church during Its First Five Hundred Years...." for a biblicist, philological, Christian patristic approach, and "Hart, D. B. 2019. That All shall be Saved...." for a moral philosophical, historical-critical biblical, and Christian patristic approach.

Van Bunge, W. & Klever, W. N. A. (eds.). 1996. Disguised and Overt Spinozism Around 1700: Papers Presented at the International Colloquium, Held at Rotterdam, 5-8 October. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History; English and French Edition: Brill Academic Publishers. https://brill.com/view/title/2605?language=en.

Veyne, P. 1983. Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leur mythes? Paris, France: Éditions du Seuil. 1988 transl. Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Archive link: https://archive.org/details/didgreeksbelieve0000veyn/page/n7/mode/2up. This work examines the sophistication of ancient Greek culture which allowed for the Greeks to question their received myths, and as we highlight, begin the first Enlightenment, the Greek Enlightenment. Cited by Stenudd, 2007. Referenced in chapter I. From Mythos to Cosmos in the history of cosmology: https://enlightenmentlegacy.net/cosmos/Cosmos.html.

Volney, C. F. 1757-1820; i.e., Constantin François de Chassebœuf, Comte de Volney (his own contraction of Voltaire and Ferney, now the village of Voltaire-Ferney). 1791. Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur les Révolutions des Empires. 1796. The Ruins, or Survey of the Revolutions of Empires. (2nd edition). London, UK: J. Johnson, St. Paul's Churchyard. https://archive.org/details/ruinsorsurveyofr01voln. 1890 Eckler Engl. transl. The Ruins, or Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires: And the Law of Nature. Library of Liberal Classics. New York, NY: Peter Eckler. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1397/1397-h/1397-h.htm. A traveler to the 'Orient,' Volney was a Deist and an advocate of complete church and state separation as well as of an international league of nations. He was also a friend of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, the Baron d'Holbach, and the Marquis de Condorcet.

Voltaire (un nom de plume), Francois-Marie de Arouet. 1694-1778. Voltaire Foundation for Enlightenment Studies, University of Oxford, UK. http://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk. The complete works of Voltaire, Oeuvres Completes de Voltaire, (https://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/oeuvres-completes-de-voltaire/) have been edited in a critical edition project which has just finished (1968-2022), appearing in 205 volumes (10 of them Voltaire marginalia). A short ~11 minute movie, "Editing Voltaire" has been produced and embedded to summarize the project: https://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/editing-voltaire/; also available on YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wDzb25Q5Lg. A series of additional publications including important clandestine manuscripts of the Enlightenment are also published: https://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/additional-publications/. Electronic Enlightenment online archive of tens of thousands of primary documents from the 17th century through the mid-19th century: https://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/electronic-enlightenment-2/. The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment journal with >500 volumes since 1955: https://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/oxford-university-studies-in-the-enlightenment/; the series may be browsed at the Liverpool University Press dedicated site: https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/imprints/Voltaire%20Foundation/. Finally, there are the correspondences of Voltaire, Rousseau, Bayle, Gaffigny, Morellet, and La Beaumelle: https://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/correspondences/. And much more. Cf. also "Voltaire: The Rascal Philosopher" (documentary link).

de Waal, F. 2009. The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. New York, NY: Crown Publishing, Harmony Books. The presence of reciprocity and biological empathy in Nature. 

____. 2013. The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

Waldman, S. 2008. Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America. New York, NY: Random House. Waldman in this book contests claims from the political culture wars that (a) the US was founded by secular Deists and that (b) the US was founded to be a 'Christian nation' as a product of 'Christian nationalists,' and that many of the founders felt that religious faith should be left free and untrammeled to flourish, hence the 'no religious test' and the protections of the first clauses of the 1st Amendment. Note: As with many of the Enlightenment thinkers, it should be remembered that many of the founding thought leaders had their publicly-stated pronouncements and their often private or largely confidential world-views. A recommended companion to this study would be M. Stewart's 2014 study (cited above), Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic.   

Waligore, J. 2022. The Spirituality of the English and American Deists: How God Became Good. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books: Rowman & Littlefield. Book link. An earlier version in an academic point-of-view on Enlightenment Deism: "How God became good: The spirituality of the English and American Deists." https://www.academia.edu/32776170/. One work and approach exploring how Enlightenment Deism was a moral revolt against the deity / deities portrayed in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic faiths.

Watt, W. M. 1972. The influence of Islam on Medieval Europe. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. An important historical work.

Williams, Helen Maria. 1759-1827. Radical and revolutionary poet of the late high Enlightenment, translator of works into French. Radical abolitionist, defender of the French Revolution: https://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/authors/pers00276.shtml.

Wilson, E. O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York, NY: Vintage Books, A division of Random House. This splendid little volume celebrates the dream of the unification of the sciences, the humanities, and the arts. It starts with the roots of unified knowledge in the "Ionian Enchantment" or the Greek Enlightenment up through the Enlightenment and the many modern advances. Of the 17th and 18th century Enlightenment, Wilson says, "The Enlightenment, defiantly secular in orientation while indebted and attentive to theology, had brought the Western mind to the threshold of a new freedom. It waved aside everything, to give precedence to the ethic of free inquiry. It pictured a universe in which humanity plays the role of perpetual adventurer. For two centuries God seemed to speak in a new voice to humankind" (p. 41).

Witzel, E. J. M. 2012. The Origins of the World's Mythologies. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. This volume pulls together the biogeographical mapping of human mythogony, grand mythologies, and human genetics through the phylogeographic tracing of indigenous myths by tracing the peoples with which they are associated, via maternal mtDNA and paternal Y-chromosomal DNA. This massive, unfinished project is very much in the naturalizing dream and legacy of the Enlightenment. Naturally the research continues to advance beyond this paradigmatic change in origins of myth research beyond 'Jungian archetypes.' See Cosmology—A History, chapter I. From Mythos to Cosmos. 

Wolfe, P. 2006. Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4), 387-409. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240. This scholarly study, implicitly operating from universal (Enlightenment) moral values, shows that the logic of settler colonialism and its political states, is based on an underlying eliminationist and genocidal logic / mind-set toward the indigenous peoples of any land being thus settler-colonized, and has historically operated that way in practice at horrifying costs in genocidal displacement. For examples, the settler colonization of the native indigenous homelands of North and South America, southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Palestine are illustrative. For such discussions, see the Journal of Genocide Research.

---