Enlightenment

Diderot, Jonathan Edwards and Václav Havel: three births on 5 October

Denis Diderot was born on 5 October 1713, Jonathan Edwards on the same date in 1703, Václav Havel in 1936. An encyclopaedist who lost his faith, a Calvinist who argued that necessity leaves responsibility intact, and a playwright who asked a greengrocer to take the slogan out of his window: three answers to the gap between belief and life.

Denis Diderot, Václav Havel

Condillac, Dilthey and Goldman: knowing on 30 September and 1 October

Two calendar days gather thinkers who each moved a boundary of knowledge: Condillac, born 30 September 1714, who built a mind out of sensation; Rumi, traditionally born the same day in 1207; Claudia Card on atrocity; and, on 1 October, the death of Dilthey and the birth of Alvin Goldman, with Istvan Meszaros.

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Wilhelm Dilthey, Jalal al-Din Rumi

Bossuet, Loyola's order and Vincent de Paul: the day history was given a plan

Paul III approved the Society of Jesus on 27 September 1540. Bossuet, educated by Jesuits and the last great theologian of history as God's design, was born at Dijon on 27 September 1627. Vincent de Paul, whose Tuesday conferences the young Bossuet attended, died on the date in 1660. Three institutions of providence, and the philosophers they trained.

Assisted thinking in the Alps, and the rest of philosophy's late September

The 29th Philosophicum Lech opens in Vorarlberg under the title 'Betreutes Denken', a pun on assisted living that puts Kant's word for immaturity next to artificial intelligence. Vancouver's World Congress on Logic and Religion and Penn's Foucault centenary follow within days, and four meetings in Ghent, Lublin, Bucharest and Berlin have just closed.

Immanuel Kant, Michel Foucault

Leibniz beyond the cartoon: the man who wanted to calculate thought

Three centuries after his death in Hanover, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz survives in undergraduate memory as the man with the monads and the man Voltaire mocked. Both caricatures obscure the project that actually drove him: the conviction that reasoning could be made into a calculation, and the reasons he thought machines could never finish the job.

Timothy Williamson, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

10 September: Wollstonecraft's death, Bataille's birth and the argument about limits

Mary Wollstonecraft died on this date in 1797, eleven days after giving birth. Georges Bataille was born on it a century later, and Paul Virilio died on it in 2018. Three lives with almost nothing in common, and one shared preoccupation: where the line is drawn, and who draws it.

Georges Bataille, Mary Wollstonecraft, Paul Virilio

This Day in Philosophy — 6 September: Mendelssohn and Haraway, two ways of asking who counts as a subject

Moses Mendelssohn was born on 6 September 1729; Donna Haraway on 6 September 1944. One argued that a state has no business inspecting its citizens' beliefs; the other dismantled the figure of the pure human subject with a cyborg. Two hundred and fifteen years apart, both were asking who gets admitted to the community of reason.

The competition that made Rousseau famous is now worth fifty thousand dollars

The Berggruen Institute's essay competition takes its inspiration from the Dijon Academy contest that Rousseau won in 1750. It does not want a peer-reviewed paper; it wants an essay in the tradition of Montaigne and Emerson. One of the 2025 winners was Anil Seth, a name this column has been citing all week.

Spinoza: the quiet revenge of the man Amsterdam expelled

Cast out of his congregation at twenty-three under the heaviest curse its elders could pronounce, he ground lenses for a living and left his masterwork unpublished. But Spinoza's real radicalism was never his atheism: he did not deny God, he stripped God of personhood.