Here, Kant is not primarily concerned with enlightenment as the activity or condition of an individual: rather as something that human beings must work towards together.
We also ignore an entire tradition of enlightenment thinking that concerned the question of how nation states can curtail their natural tendency towards conflict by conditioning their claims to sovereignty through international legally sanctioned structures.
The dangers of onanism became a key concern of Enlightenment thinkers, whose preoccupation with social order made them see this inherently private activity as self-abuse in the most literal sense.
James Tyrell, one of those who attended that evening, is a source of enlightenment on this matter he later recalled that the discussion concerned morality and revealed religion.
Kant's famous essay, "What is Enlightenment?" (1784), has been of particular importance to commentators concerned with Kantian reason and politics.
But Hume is mainly concerned in the Dialogues with the other major pillar of natural religion in the Enlightenment, the "empirical" argument, the teleological argument or the argument from design.
All religion is concerned with postmortem security with linking mortal man to an eternal realm whether it be achieved by ritual magic, divine assistance, or mystic enlightenment.
Try David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion for an Enlightenment reworking of the philosophical talking shop or Aristophanes' The Clouds for a very different - and much funnier - eyewitness account of Socrates.
In one of the most important philosophical texts on natural religion to appear during the Enlightenment, David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (published posthumously in 1779), this supposition is criticized relentlessly, incisively and in detail.
This work was supported by a 2010 Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (22592581) entitled Investigations of the Consciousness of Parents of Junior and Senior High School Students Concerning Schizophrenia and the Development of Educational Enlightenment Media.
