Portable Enlightenment Reader

Portable Enlightenment Reader

by Isaac Kramnick (Editor)
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Trade Paperback, 704 pages
Price: $24.00

The Age of Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, also called the Age of Reason, was so named for an exultant intellectual movement that shook the foundations of Western civilization. In championing radical ideas such as individual liberty and an empirical appraisal of the universe through rational inquiry and natural experience, Enlightenment philosophers in Europe and America planted the seeds for modern liberalism, cultural humanism, science and technology, and laissez-faire capitalism.

This volume brings together the era’s classic works, with more than a hundred selections from a broad range of sources—including works by Kant, Diderot, Voltaire, Newton, Rousseau, Locke, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, and Paine—that demonstrate the pervasive impact of Enlightenment views on philosophy and epistemology as well as on political, social, and economic institutions. Included are seminal discourses on science and religion, on the social contract, on the equality (and inequality) of the sexes and the races, and on economics and markets, as well as homages to nature and sexual pleasure, and poetry and opera librettos that embody the movement’s social ideals.

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Dr. Gregory Soderberg of Moscow, Idaho, 5/26/2022
As a teacher with Logos Online School, we decided to take this book off our reading list. It contains selections from John Cleland's "Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," which is a pornographic novel. Parents should be aware of this before purchasing this book. Most of the relevant selections required by Omnibus VI can be found online, for free, anyway.