Author: Alan Charles Kors
Alan Charles Kors is one of the world’s leading scholars on the history of the Enlightenment. He served as editor in chief of the four-volume Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2002) and was selected by the Teaching Company to teach an elegant course on The Birth of the Modern Mind.
The Enlightenment, Naturalism, and the Secularization of Values
The most influential contribution of the Enlightenment to modern thought, after its transformation of religious toleration from a negative to a positive value, was the secularization of ethical debate. Historically, however, it would be one-dimensional—indeed wrong—to understand this phenomenon as the product of a virgin birth of ideas in the Enlightenment. Both deistic and atheistic …