Enlightenment · materialism · Encyclopédie · 1713–1784

Denis Diderot

Gather knowledge to change the common way of thinking.

Langres · Paris · St Petersburg

Reading guides

A thread to guide your reading.

Original introductions to enter the works, discover their central questions and take the reflection further.

Explore how the Encyclopédie organized knowledge, honoured the trades and used cross-references to question authority under censorship.

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.

Read D’Alembert’s Dream as a philosophical experiment in which sleep and medicine give voice to a materialist theory of life and thought.

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Read and answered: Seneca
Thomas Hobbes
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Read by: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Karl Marx
Sigmund Freud
Michel Foucault
In dialogue: Voltaire
Jean-Jacques Rousseau