I love cutting through the small talk and getting down to what matters, including the nuance of lived experience. I'm here to seek out that nuance in a world that wants to oversimplify. Progressive, anti-LLM, reader, rainforest mind, generalist nerd, immigrant, covid informed, heartfelt communication. ICF accredited coach focusing on belonging and connection and supporting people to discover and embrace their authentic selves. DM me for a free introductory session. Bio pic "The Yellow Gloves" by Esther Paterson Gill (1938) and background image "Still Life with Books and Cards" by Roger de La Fresnaye (1913)
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I love cutting through the small talk and getting down to what matters, including the nuance of lived experience. I'm here to seek out that nuance in a world that wants to oversimplify. Progressive, anti-LLM, reader, rainforest mind, generalist nerd, immigrant, covid informed, heartfelt communication. ICF accredited coach focusing on belonging and connection and supporting people to discover and embrace their authentic selves. DM me for a free introductory session. Bio pic "The Yellow Gloves" by Esther Paterson Gill (1938) and background image "Still Life with Books and Cards" by Roger de La Fresnaye (1913)
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@Furthering@convo.casa
·
Jan 31, 2026
I got a lot out of reading The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters by Anthony Pagden.
As someone who accidentally found themselves learning about the Enlightenment due to some synchronicity of the universe and having decided it was a worthy topic to spend more time on, I leaned into it.
This book does a good job of presenting personalities and their ideas in a way that is places them in context without dumbing them down (I felt completely respected as a reader) to offer a broad survey of the topics the philosophes and scholars were tackling.
Whether you know anything about the Enlightenment or not, if you're a person who is able to connect ideas, the book shows how the Enlightenment thinkers set up the seeds of ideas that we either take for granted today or that we're still grappling with because they are so harmful.
It's interesting to see some surprisingly "enlightened" ideas coming out of that time, even though they may have been in conflict with other ideas held by the same person -- or even their actions. For example, Captain James Cook, if you can believe it, was concerned about the diseases that explorers were bringing to the peoples they encountered on their voyages, but this didn't, apparently, stop him from contributing to the problem.
Of course, this book is mostly the story of men, and privileged white men at that. And though the Enlightenment as a historic phenomena has a sort of glowing mythology to it (and the thinkers who figure prominently in it do as well), the author doesn't buy into that. Pagden's intent is not to play favorites -- he doesn't shy from presenting, in a subtle way, their ideas as flawed, their metaphors strained, or their arguments thin. (However, okay, I might have sensed a particular dislike of Hobbes, to which I say, "Fair!")
#Books #Bookstodon #Reading #Enlightenment #History
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