In 1762 a Protestant shopkeeper in Toulouse was tortured and executed for a murder that never happened. An aging writer living near the Swiss border read about the case, investigated it, and spent three years shaming the most powerful courts in France until they admitted the mistake. A few years earlier, a Paris editor had been locked in a fortress for his ideas and released only because his publishers needed him to finish a dictionary. Within a generation that dictionary filled twenty-eight volumes and taught Europe to look at religion, government and work with new eyes. These were the people of the Enlightenment, and their weapons were wit, evidence, and the printed page.

This course follows them from Kant's famous challenge, dare to know, through the popular science that made Newton a celebrity, Voltaire's war on fanaticism, and the long struggle to publish the Encyclopédie. You will sit in on a Paris salon and a London coffeehouse, meet Hume and Adam Smith in Edinburgh, and watch kings and an empress try to put philosophy into practice. Finally you will face the movement's blind spots, from slavery to empire, and ask what parts of its legacy are worth defending and extending today.