I. the eighteenth-century debate: 1. The question and some and some answers; 2. The public use of reason; 3. Faith and enlightenmment; 4. The politics of enlightenment; II. Historical reflecitons; III. Twentieth-century questions This collection provides the translation of a group of important eighteenth-century German essays that address the question `What is Enlightenment?` The book also includes newly translated and newly written interpretive essays by leading histrians and philosophers, which examine the origins of eighteenth-century debate on the Enlightenment and explore its significance for the present. Included are translations of works by figures as Immanuel Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Georg Hamann. These eighteenth-century texts are set against interpretive essays by such major twentieth-century figures as Max Horkheimer, Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault.