Denis Diderot

French philosopher, writer and art critic (1713–1784), born in Langres into a family of prosperous artisans, initially trained with a view to the priesthood and then in law, but who soon decided to earn his living as an independent writer in Paris, where he endured years of financial hardship before becoming one of the central figures of the French Enlightenment. His magnum opus and the project that dominated much of his adult life was the editorship, alongside d'Alembert, of the Encyclopédie (1751–1772), a monumental work in seventeen volumes of text and eleven of plates that aspired to gather and systematise all human knowledge of its time — from the arts and crafts to the sciences, philosophy and politics — and which became the most ambitious and influential instrument for spreading Enlightenment thought across eighteenth-century Europe, despite the censorship, suspensions of publishing privilege and accusations of religious and political subversion Diderot constantly had to face during the twenty years the project lasted. Beyond the Encyclopédie, Diderot developed an original and often radical philosophical body of work, set out mainly in dialogues and essays he himself chose not to publish during his lifetime out of prudence, such as Rameau's Nephew, a dialogic satire on the relationship between genius, morality and social hypocrisy, and D'Alembert's Dream, where he develops a bold materialist and evolutionary philosophy of nature that anticipates in many respects later biological ideas. His Letter on the Blind (1749), which speculated on how a person blind from birth might develop their own morality and epistemology without reference to the visual world, earned him several months' imprisonment at the Château de Vincennes for its materialist and atheistic implications. A pioneering art critic with his Salons, periodic reviews of Parisian painting exhibitions, and an experimental novelist with Jacques the Fatalist, Diderot combined throughout his career a coherent philosophical materialism with a passionate defence of intellectual freedom and an encyclopaedic curiosity that make him one of the most versatile minds of the entire European Enlightenment.

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