Denis Diderot
Gather knowledge to change the common way of thinking.
The son of a master cutler from Langres, Denis Diderot became the chief editor of the Encyclopédie, the collective dictionary that set out to gather the sciences, arts and trades and to change the common way of thinking. A materialist and atheist who kept his boldest works in manuscript, he was also a novelist, playwright, art critic and letter writer, and he made dialogue the form of a restless, experimental philosophy.
If everything is matter in motion, what becomes of virtue, genius and freedom?
The essentials
A life in dates
Biography- 1713–1732Langres and Paris
- 1743–1746Translations and a burned book
- 1751–1765Volumes against censorship
- 1769–1774The Dream and Russia
- 1784Death in Paris
Biography
The son of a master cutler from Langres, Denis Diderot became the chief editor of the Encyclopédie, the collective dictionary that set out to gather the sciences, arts and trades and to change the common way of thinking. A materialist and atheist who kept his boldest works in manuscript, he was also a novelist, playwright, art critic and letter writer, and he made dialogue the form of a restless, experimental philosophy.
Philosophy
Sensibility is treated as a general property of matter, inert in a stone and active in an animal; thought then arises from organized living matter, without any immaterial soul being needed to explain it.
Reading guides
Original introductions to enter the works, discover their central questions and take the reflection further.
Bibliography
Works, testimonies and further readings are distinguished. Dates refer to composition or first publication, as specified in each entry.
Who came before, who came after.
Above the timeline, each solid arc marks a documented reading, back in time or forward; dotted arcs pair kindred questions.
Read and answered3
In dialogue2
A first reading.
A dictionary against prejudice
Explore how the Encyclopédie organized knowledge, honoured the trades and used cross-references to question authority under censorship.
Encyclopédie, or Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and TradesMe and Him at the café
Follow the duel between the philosopher and Rameau’s nephew to see how a dialogue can let the most unsettling voice speak at full strength.
Rameau’s NephewMatter that dreams
Read D’Alembert’s Dream as a philosophical experiment in which sleep and medicine give voice to a materialist theory of life and thought.
D’Alembert’s DreamLinked thinkers
- Read and answered
- In dialogue