Gather knowledge to change the common way of thinking.
Works, testimonies and further readings are distinguished. Dates refer to composition or first publication, as specified in each entry.
These records present three works: the Encyclopédie that Diderot edited with d’Alembert, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream. The Letter on the Blind, the Salons, Jacques the Fatalist, The Nun, the Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage, the Paradox of the Actor and the letters to Sophie Volland are not indexed; this is a selection.
011751–1772
Launched by the bookseller André Le Breton as a translation of Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, the project became an original work under Diderot and d’Alembert from 1747. The first volume appeared in 1751; when the privilege was revoked in 1759, d’Alembert had already withdrawn, and Diderot finished the text volumes clandestinely, discovering in 1764 that Le Breton had secretly cut passages from the proofs.
021761–1774
Begun around 1761 in reaction to Palissot’s comedy The Philosophers, which had mocked Diderot and his friends in 1760, the dialogue was revised for years and never published by its author. It first appeared in Goethe’s German translation in 1805, and the autograph manuscript surfaced only in 1890, so that its history is itself a lesson in clandestine writing.
031769
Written in 1769, when Diderot was reading the physiologists and naturalists of his time, the trilogy alarmed d’Alembert and Julie de Lespinasse, who asked that it be destroyed. Copies survived; one circulated discreetly in the Correspondance littéraire in 1782, but the text was first printed only in 1830, long after its author’s death.