Diderot, Denis

(1713-1784)

   writer, philosopher

   Born in Langres to a well-to-do bourgeois family, Denis Diderot, a major figure of the enlightenment, studied theology, philosophy, and law at the sorbonne, while living a bohemian existence. There he spent several years pursuing a variety of professions. His first serious work, published anonymously, was "Penséesphilosophiques" (1746), in which he presented his deistic philosophy, followed by Les Bijoux indiscrets (1748). In 1747 he was invited to edit a French translation of the English Encyclopaedia. Instead, collaborating with jean le rond d'alembert, Diderot converted the project into a vast, controversial, and new work, the 35-volume Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, usually known as the Encyclopédie. He worked on this project from 1747 to 1766 with the assistance of the most celebrated writers and thinkers of the age, including Montesquieu, voltaire, and others. Diderot, ever the skeptic and rationalist, used the Encyclopédie to attack the conservatism, superstitions, religious authority and semifeudal social norms of the period. Consequently, the Conseil du roi suppressed the early volumes (published after 1751) and the remainder Diderot had printed secretly. Diderot's other voluminous writings include La religieuse (1760), an attack on convent life; Le fils naturel (1757); Le Père de famille (1758); a social satire, Le Neveu de Rameau (1761-74), published by J. W. von Goethe in 1805; Est-il bon? Est-il méchant (1781); and Jacques le Fataliste et son maître (published 1796), which explored the psychology of determination and free will. Diderots's materialist theories are found in his Lettre sur les aveugles à l'usage de ceux qui voient (1749) on learning among the blind, and dramatic philosophical dialogues, Le rêve d'Alembert (1769) and Supplement au voyage de Bougainville (published 1796). In his Correspondance with sophie volland, he exalts nature as a "divine" force. As a leader in aesthetic criticism, Diderot, in 1759, founded Les Salons, a journal in which he critiqued the annual Paris art exhibition. In an age of famous letter writing, he was unexcelled in his correspondence. He won the patronage of Catherine the Great of Russia, whom he visited in 1773, and was a major influence on other thinkers of the Enlightenment.