Given the scope and success of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, it seems inconceivable that it would come under attack, let under suffer almost total philosophical repudiation. Yet that is what is happening today—and this lecture explains why. Dr. Ridpath looks at the seeds of this change within some of the Enlightenment figures themselves, and then discusses the overt repudiation led by thinkers like Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. This lecture provides a better understanding of the evolution of our own paradoxical age, where embattled islands of Enlightenment thought flourish, while surrounded by a rising tide of anti-Enlightenment nihilism.