Early modern Europe · 1713–1784
Denis Diderot
Chief editor of the Encyclopédie, materialist and critic
He edited the Encyclopédie to gather all human knowledge and “change the common way of thinking”. In dialogues unpublished in his lifetime he imagined a materialist account of life in which matter itself comes to feel and think.
Life and thought
Denis Diderot, a master cutler’s son from Langres, studied in Paris and lived for years as a translator and hack writer. In 1749 his Letter on the Blind, which hinted at atheism, earned him some three months’ imprisonment at Vincennes. From 1747 he was chief editor of the Encyclopédie, which grew to seventeen volumes of text and eleven of plates (1751–72); he steered it for a quarter of a century through bans, censorship and the withdrawal of his co-editor d’Alembert. Late in life he visited Catherine the Great in St Petersburg.
The Encyclopédie aimed, in Diderot’s words, to change the common way of thinking. It arranged knowledge on a tree adapted from Bacon, gave crafts and machines the same dignity as theology, and slipped criticism of Church and state into cross-references. In private works such as D’Alembert’s Dream (written 1769, published 1830) he developed a materialism in which sensitivity is a property of matter itself, so that life and thought emerge from organised matter without any soul — an idea that anticipates evolutionary biology. His Salons also founded modern art criticism.
Works
Shaped by
1561–1626Francis BaconThe Encyclopédie arranged knowledge on a tree adapted from Bacon’s division into memory, reason and imagination.Meanwhile, in other traditions
1768–1834Friedrich SchleiermacherBerlin theologian and translator of Plato, father of modern hermeneuticsOn the record
D’Alembert’s Dream is dated 1769.
Diderot wrote the dialogues in 1769. They circulated anonymously in the manuscript newsletter Correspondance littéraire in 1782 and were first published as a book in 1830, long after his death.
Sources: Wikipedia, “D’Alembert’s Dream” · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Denis Diderot”