Revolutions in thought are more far-reaching than those in politics or science. They affect how we grant legitimacy to authority, define what is possible, create standards of right and wrong, and even view the potential of human life. Europe was brought to its knees between 1600 and 1800 by a revolution of the intellect. What we now know as the Enlightenment challenged previously accepted ways of understanding reality, bringing about modern science, representative democracy, and a wave of wars, sparking what Professor Kors calls perhaps the most profound transformation of European, if not human, life.

You will learn about the cultural revolution of the Enlightenment in this series of 24 insightful lectures. The birth of modern thought in the 17th and 18th-century mind can be seen in the debates and extraordinary works of the likes of Hobbes and Locke.

Europeans came to believe that they had a new understanding of thought and the human mind, of method and nature, and of the uses of knowledge, with which they could come to know the world correctly for the first time in human history.