ABSTRACT
Like it or not, the West today (and not only the West) is a legacy of what has come to be known in English as ‘the Enlightenment’. Many of the values, practices and institutions of our present civilisation are rooted in the eighteenth century, which helped to liberate a vast human potential that determined much of the shape and direction of the world we now inhabit. Michel Foucault’s claim that the Enlightenment ‘has determined, at least in part, what we are, what we think, and what we do today’ is beyond serious dispute.1
