PhD, Oct. 19 -- Although the Enlightenment revolutionized human thought and transformed the world, it failed to produce a coherent theory of knowledge. The central reason is that the modernist systems of science and philosophy that emerged during the Enlightenment failed to produce a clear descriptive system for understanding the relationship between (a) matter and mind and (b) social and scientific knowledge. These two problems combine to make up what I call the Enlightenment Gap.

The claim these are two unresolved problems that stem from Enlightenment thinking does not require much justification, as they represent some of the most prominent areas of controversy and confusion in modern sense-making. Consider, for example, that the "mind...