By the end of the 18th century, Edinburgh had become one of the most important outposts of Enlightenment and was becoming known as a Modern Athens. How had Edinburgh come to earn this title? In what ways did the meaning of this title change in the following century? What meaning, if any, and what significance does it have today? Dr Nicholas Phillipson lectured in History at Edinburgh from 1965 and retired from full-time employment in 2004 and was appointed Honorary Research Fellow. He has held visiting appointments at Princeton, Yale, Tulsa, the Folger Library, Washington DC and the Ludwigs-Maximilian Universitat, Munich. His research interests have focused on the cultural and intellectual history of early modern and modern Scotland with a particular interest in the history of the Scottish enlightenment. He was co-director of a Leverhulme-funded project on the Science of Man in Scotland. He was an associate editor of the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He is one of the founder editors of a new journal Modern Intellectual History and he is a past president of the Eighteenth Century Scottish Studies Society.