The eighteenth century was a formative era for European conceptions of human beings and human nature.

This period saw a burgeoning quest for a science of man, and a philosophy of the human, which would incorporate developments in history, ethnography, linguistics and the natural and life sciences. It has been suggested that the eighteenth century witnessed a distinctive epistemic shift towards the articulation of the subject ‘Man’.

Yet is the Enlightenment concept of Man best understood as a shared intellectual supposition or as a terrain of conflict in which competing visions of human life and contemporary political order were mobilised?

Full details available on the Humanities Research Centre website