Joanna Stalnaker, "The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death" (Yale UP, 2025)

New Books in Critical Theory · Jun 9, 2026 · 1h 7m

What would the Enlightenment look like if we viewed it through the eyes of the philosophers as they were facing death? Joanna Stalnaker turns our usual perspective on the Enlightenment on its head, bringing to light a set of works written at the end of the Old Regime and at the end of their authors’ lives. These works, all written before the French Revolution, cast a retrospective glance over the intellectual movement their authors participated in, and over the authors’ own lives and works. Stalnaker shows that the beauty of these works stems from their authors’ efforts to give literary form…