The Loss of Reason: The Radical Philosophes’ Attack Against Rational Religion and Kierkegaard’s Religious Anti-rationalism

Several interpreters have evaluated the attempts of the eighteenth-century radical philosophes Denis Diderot and Baron d’Holbach to undermine religion by refuting its rationality as unsuccessful. This article will first present the radical philosophes’ main arguments against the rationality of religion and then suggest that although these arguments failed to convince their initial readers, based on Kierkegaard’s anti-rationalist conception of religion, their project was eventually successful.