Diderot, Denis

It is a well-worn, yet astonishingly resilient, cliché that the Enlightenment was the 'Age of Reason.' By focusing on Diderot and Helvétius this paper shows that, rather than proceeding in the name of reason, key figures within the progressive philosophy of the French Enlightenment were in fact extremely suspicious of abstract reasoning and attempted to construct a philosophy which purged the faculty of reason entirely from its philosophical anthropology and reduced the mind's functions to the single faculty of sensation and so to the passions. It is in this sense that philosophy of the French Enlightenment attempted to produce a philosophy without reason. This paper will reconstruct this attempt. In doing so it will again engage critically with the idea that the philosophy of the Enlightenment was dogmatically rationalist. It will provide a historical case-study of a period in which philosophy pushed against the limits of its own identity. And it will use this attempt to reflect on the mythological not historiographical service the cliché of Enlightenment Reason plays for the philosophical identity.

Sensibility, in any of its myriad realms – moral, physical, aesthetic, medical and so on – seems to be a paramount case of a higher-level, intentional property, not a basic property. Diderot famously made the bold and attributive move of postulating that matter itself senses, or that sensibility (perhaps better translated ‘sensitivity’ here) is a general or universal property of matter, even if he at times took a step back from this claim and called it a “supposition.” Crucially, sensibility is here playing the role of a ‘booster’: it enables materialism to provide a full and rich account of the phenomena of conscious, sentient life, contrary to what its opponents hold: for if matter can sense, and sensibility is not a merely mechanical process, then the loftiest cognitive plateaus are accessible to materialist analysis, or at least belong to one and the same world as the rest of matter. This was noted by the astute anti-materialist critic, the Abbé Lelarge de Lignac, who, in his 1751 Lettres à un Amériquain, criticized Buffon for “granting to the body [la machine, a common term for the body at the time] a quality which is essential to minds, namely sensibility.” This view, here attributed to Buffon and definitely held by Diderot, was comparatively rare. If we look for the sources of this concept, the most notable ones are physiological and medical treatises by prominent figures such as Robert Whytt, Albrecht von Haller and the Montpellier vitalist Théophile de Bordeu. We then have, or so I shall try to sketch out, an intellectual landscape in which new – or newly articulated – properties such as irritability and sensibility are presented either as an experimental property of muscle fibers, that can be understood mechanistically (Hallerian irritability, as studied recently by Hubert Steinke and Dominique Boury) or a property of matter itself (whether specifically living matter as in Bordeu and his fellow montpelliérains Ménuret and Fouquet, or matter in general, as in Diderot). I am by no means convinced that it is one and the same ‘sensibility’ that is at issue in debates between these figures (as when Bordeu attacks Haller’s distinction between irritability and sensibility and claims that ‘his own’ property of sensibility is both more correct and more fundamental in organic beings), but I am interested in mapping out a topography of the problem of sensibility as property of matter or as vital force in mid-eighteenth-century debates – not an exhaustive cartography of all possible positions or theories, but an attempt to understand the ‘triangulation’ of three views: a vitalist view in which sensibility is fundamental, matching up with a conception of the organism as the sum of parts conceived as little lives (Bordeu et al.); a mechanist, or ‘enhanced mechanist’ view in which one can work upwards, step by step from the basic property of irritability to the higher-level property of sensibility (Haller); and, more eclectic, a materialist view which seeks to combine the mechanistic, componential rigour and explanatory power of the Hallerian approach, with the monistic and metaphysically explosive potential of the vitalist approach (Diderot). It is my hope that examining Diderot in the context of this triangulated topography of sensibility as property sheds light on his famous proclamation regarding sensibility as a universal property of matter.

Cet article est consacré au rapport que, dans la France du XVIII e siècle, la réflexion sur l'utilité et la légitimité des systèmes entretient avec le débat sur le statut et l'usage des mathématiques. En retraçant une double ligne d'opposition-entre Formey et Condillac, d'une part, et entre d'Alembert et le couple Diderot-Buffon, d'autre part-on s'attache à décrire l'émergence d'un partage significatif à l'intérieur du front newtonien; partage qui reflète des changements profonds s'opérant dans le panorama philosophique et scientifique de l'époque. À la fin de ce parcours, une question supplémentaire se pose au sujet du destin réservé aux mathématiques et aux systèmes après 1750.

This paper focuses on the link between systems criticism and anti-mathematicism in the French-speaking philosophical literature of the mid-18 th century. Moving from Condillac's omissions to the exemplary cases of Diderot and Buffon-as well as considering Formey's crucial remarks-I reconsider the complex relationship that the authors of the French Enlightenment have with the Newtonian model. Finally, I inquire into the fate awaiting both mathematics and systems in this context after 1750.

This work addresses bell hooks’s call for the development of an alternative to patriarchal masculinity which she calls feminist masculinity. Patriarchal masculinity has convinced most men and women that the development of different forms of masculinity goes against our biological nature. Yet there exists a history of men’s experiences that contradicts this perspective and amounts to, I argue, men’s feminist history.
In particular I argue that the life and work of French philosophe Condorcet constitutes a historical cornerstone for feminist masculinity. An important implication of this work
is the understanding that gender dissolution is not the only strategy capable of rectifying gender inequality. Siding with a range of feminist perspectives, from ecofeminism and Black feminism, I contend that we can accomplish much through a critical reconstruction of men and masculinity, including the reevaluation of historic figures such as Condorcet.

Cet article s’attache à un aspect fondamental de la philosophie matérialiste de Diderot, à savoir le fait que l’individualité psychologique ne peut pas correspondre à l’individu matériel que nous sommes parce que la mémoire sur laquelle elle repose est toujours en quelque sorte partielle. Que faire alors si cet individu matériel lui-même voit son existence mise en doute, du fait que, comme l’annonce le Rêve de d’Alembert, le seul individu, c’est le Tout  ? En mettant en relation ces deux démarches, nous montrons comment on peut élaborer une théorie de l’individu qui tienne compte du décalage entre l’individuation comme processus physique et de la constitution de l’individualité comme processus psychologique. | This paper is devoted to a fundamental aspect of Diderot’s materialist philosophy: the fact that psychological identity does not exactly correspond with the material individuals we are because the memories on which psychological identity relies are always partial. This is complicated by the fact that even the material individual is denied reality - since, as is stated in the Rêve de d’Alembert, the only individual is the Whole  . By relating these two approaches, I try to show how one can develop a theory of the individual that takes into account the gap between individuation as a physical process and the constitution of a psychological individual.

RÉSUMÉ : Les interprétations habituelles de l’article «Éclectisme» de l’Encyclopédie mettent l’accent sur l’idée que Diderot y annonce le programme de la philosophie moderne, dont il se ferait par le fait même un illustre représentant et l’un des promoteurs. Dans cet article, j’essaie de compléter cette interprétation en montrant que l’article est également porteur d’une réflexion de premier plan sur l’histoire de la philosophie, sur les effets de continuité dans sa pratique et, conséquemment, sur ce qui est proprement constitutif du discours philosophique lui-même, tant sur le plan méthodologique qu’en ce qui concerne son positionnement politique.
ABSTRACT: The standard interpretation of Diderot’s article “Éclectisme” in the Encyclopédie emphasizes the idea that Diderot is setting out the program for modern philosophy, thereby making himself its illustrious representative and promoter. In this paper, I complement this interpretation by showing that “Éclectisme” also contains an influential reflection on continuity in the history of philosophy and, consequently, on what constitutes philosophical discourse itself, both  methodologically and politically.

At the very beginning of L’Homme-Machine, La Mettrie claims that Leibnizians with their monads have “rather spiritualized matter than materialized the soul”; a few years later Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and natural philosopher with a strong interest in the modes of transmission of ‘genetic’ information, conceived of living minima which he termed molecules, “endowed with desire, memory and intelligence,” in his Système de la nature ou Essai sur les corps organisés. This text first appeared in Latin in 1751 under the title Dissertatio inauguralis metaphysica de universali naturae systemate, with the pseudonym Dr Baumann; it was translated by Maupertuis in 1754 as Essai sur la formation des corps organisés and was later included in his 1756 Œuvres under the title Système de la nature. Now, it is clear that Maupertuis was a kind of Leibnizian; and that his molecule possessed higher-level, ‘mental’ properties. In that sense he falls under the first category described by La Mettrie. But he was also involved in a debate on this issue with Diderot, who put forth a sustained critique of Maupertuis’ theory of the molecule in the additions to his 1753 Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature. Where Maupertuis attributes higher-level properties to his living minima, Diderot argues that these properties are ‘organizational’, i.e., they can only be properties of the whole. At issue here is the degree of commitment to a form of materialism.

In selected texts by Diderot, including the Encyclopédie article “Cabinet d’histoire naturelle” (along with his comments in the article “Histoire naturelle”), the Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature and the Salon de 1767, I examine the interplay between philosophical naturalism and the recognition of the irreducible nature of artifice, in order to arrive at a provisional definition of Diderot’s vision of Nature as “une femme qui aime à se travestir.” How can a metaphysics in which the concept of Nature has a normative status, also ultimately consider it to be something necessarily artificial? Historically, the answer to this question involves the project of natural history. A present-day reconstruction would have to make sense of this project and relate it to the vision of Nature expressed in Diderot’s phrase. In addition, it would hopefully pinpoint the difference between this brand of Enlightenment naturalism and contemporary naturalism, and by extension, allow us to understand a bit more about what naturalism is in general.

A literary, historical and philosophical exploration of blindness, the possibilities of sensory substitution, and the perennial fascination with what the blind ‘see’

The “man born blind restored to light” was one of two foundational myths of the Enlightenment, according to Foucault. With ophthalmic surgery in its infancy, the fascination with blindness and what the blind ‘see’ once their vision is restored remained largely hypothetical. Was being blind, as Descartes once remarked, like ‘seeing with the hands’? Did evidence from early ophthalmic surgery resolve debates about the relationship between vision and touch in the newly sighted? Has the standard representation of blind figures in literature been modified by recent autobiographical accounts of blind and vision impaired writers and poets?

As this book shows, much interest in the philosophy and psychology of blindness was prompted by the so-called ‘Molyneux Question’ which Irish scientist Molyneux asked of English philosopher Locke in 1688. The question concerns ‘sensory substitution’, the translation between vision and touch, which would effect practical outcomes for the blind, including the development of Braille, the first school for the blind in Paris, and even present day Tactile-Visual Sensory Substitution (TVSS) technologies. Through an unfolding historical, philosophical, and literary narrative that encompasses Locke, Molyneux, and Berkeley in Britain, and Diderot, Voltaire, and Buffon in France, this book explores how the Molyneux Question and its aftermath has influenced attitudes towards blindness by the sighted, and technologies for the blind and vision impaired, to this day.

Alienation [Verfremdung] is a concept that is inextricably linked with the name of Bertolt Brecht; with twentieth-century modernism, the avant-garde and Marxist theory. However, alienation as a sociological and aesthetic notion avant la lettre surfaced already long before the twentieth century in the thought of eighteenth-century French philosopher Denis Diderot. This comparative study destabilizes the dramaturgical definition of 'Verfremdung' we inherited from Brecht, by looking back at the dramaturgical and philosophical writings of Denis Diderot, in particular LE PARADOXE SUR LE COMEDIEN and LE NEVEU DE RAMEAU. It thereby seeks to open up new ways of understanding its aesthetic, political and sociological dimensions and potentialities. If for the Marxist Brecht, alienation constitutes a specific stage in history tied to capitalist socio-economy, it defines for Diderot an inescapable existential condition embedded in human sociality. Brecht uses the alienation-effect to disrupt and hollow out a form of naturalism thriving on subjectivity, identification and illusion; Diderot, by contrast, plunges the spectator into processes of identification and illusion, only to create an awareness of the subject's profound situation of self-delusion. Illusion, subjectivity and identification are thus exploited as aesthetic tools to confront alienated social relations and conditions into which the subject is inscribed. Whilst a Brechtian notion of theatricality purges the theatre of its absorptive capacity, Diderot's baroque theatricality celebrates and expands the theatre in all its dimensions and forces.

Publication details: 1st Edition, Oxford: Legenda, 2011. 2nd Edition, London: Routledge, 2017.

L'article art de Diderot participe d'un premier mouvement de l'écriture encyclopédique qui s'inscrit dans un propos délibérément critique, non seulement vis-à-vis de la constitution des savoirs hérités, mais aussi de certaines tendances des Lumières, illustrées par les présupposés de la mécanique mathématique de D'Alembert. La place accordée à l'idée de machine est particulièrement révélatrice de la manière dont l'espace où « machine » voisine avec « prodige » peut être le lieu d'une réévaluation du rapport de l'esprit avec le savoir. Entre la rationalisation abstraite envisagée par D'Alembert, qui entend substituer la clarté des idées simples au flottement des notions usuelles, et la grammaire philosophique qu'envisage Diderot, ce qui est en jeu c'est l'opposition en train de devenir irréductible entre une approche encore discursive et une compréhension désormais essentiellement analytique et mathématique du réel. Ainsi, ce qui importe vraiment dans art, c'est moins la réhabilitation des arts mécaniques, que l'instauration d'un rapport au savoir différent de celui dont résulte, à titre de conséquence secondaire, l'ancien mépris du méchanique. Le philosophe selon Diderot est un artiste et la pensée est un art.

How we think of the relationship between the Jesuits and the Enlightenment largely depends on how we conceptualize the latter. This chapter addresses it as a series of debates conducted in the context of a cosmopolitan Republic of Letters and a number of specific cultural practices that made that very Republic possible. The Jesuits were, therefore, participants in, rather than enemies of, the Enlightenment. Because they combined theological conservatism with cultural modernity, the Jesuits were feared and resented with particular vehemence. Placed between two different modernities, one characterized by global structures of communication and learning, as well as by the practices of cultural accommodation, the other by the attack on superstition and religious authority, the Jesuits helped create the conditions for the Enlightenment, making important but paradoxical contributions to some of its central debates. Nowhere was it more obvious than in the impact of missionary ethnographies concerning the "Gentile" pagan peoples of the world.

This paper deals with a development of the ancient thought on mimesis in its modern reception as regards a certain idea of theatre. It defends the hypothesis that the figure of the character, as set up in Diderot's Paradoxe sur le comédien, has its source in a curious reversal of the Platonic mimesis. After presenting the main tenets of Plato's reflection on mimesis and of Diderot's theory on character, showing their convergences and contrasts, it is analyzed how such a conceptual turnaround has historically taken place, by establishing a chain of reception from Plato to Diderot passing through Cicero and the Renaissance artists.

This is an MA thesis available on Proquest (academic access): http://search.proquest.com/docview/1562959696

The Rococo period in the arts, flourishing mainly from about 1710 to about 1750, was stylistically unified, but nevertheless its tremendous productivity and appeal throughout Occidental culture has proven difficult to explain. Having no contemporary theoretical literature, the Rococo is commonly taken to have been a final and degenerate form of the Baroque era or an extravagance arising from the supposed careless frivolity of the elites, including the intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Neither approach adequately accounts for Rococo style.

Naming the Rococo raises profound issues for understanding the relations between conception and production in historical terms. Against the many difficulties that the term has involved in accounting for an immense but elusive cultural movement, this thesis argues that some of the chief philosophical conceptions of the period clarify the particular character and significance of Rococo production. Rococo production is here studied chiefly in decor, architecture, and the plastic arts. This thesis also makes an extended general argument for the value of intellectual history.

Rococo style is a group of visual effects of which the central character is atectonicity. This is established by a synthesizing overview of Rococo ornamental motifs. Principal theorists of post-Cartesian thought have failed to see how these distinguish Rococo style from both Baroque and Enlightenment culture. The analysis addresses the historical narratives of Benjamin, Adorno, Foucault, Deleuze, and others about Baroque and Enlightenment culture. The core historical claim of this thesis is that Rococo atectonic effects are visual forms of the anti-materialist, idealist ontology of George Berkeley and of the metaphysics and ontology in the early work of Giambattista Vico. Close readings of important passages from works of both philosophers published in 1710 develop the relationship between atectonics and idealist ontology. Both men rejected the Baroque hierarchical cosmology in favor of finitude as the key to human understanding. The readings center on the issue of causality, including Berkeley's views of the perfect contingency of the world and on Vico's theories of truth and ingenium.

A reading of Diderot's critique of the Rococo, which led the reaction to it, shows that he recognized the power of idealist ontology in the Rococo cultural production. The larger force in the rejection of Rococo is the emergence of the sublime as a morally fearful feature of physical nature. Montesquieu's aesthetic work also shows the transition to a more rigidly determined view of existence, which was expressed but constrained in the little-recognized lattice motif in Rococo arts.

The result of these readings is the influence during and after the Rococo period of the concept of continuous creation, in which the memory and imagination of the human subject relays God-given powers of creation into the production of culture. Continuous creation also suggested a human capability to animate material nature. Rococo style displays this as a pre-cinematic effects that represent the non-material, non-causal deep structure of reality.

From Hegel to Engels to Sartre and Raymond Ruyer (Ruyer, 1933), to name only a few, materialism is viewed as a necropolis, or the metaphysics befitting such an abode. Endless numbers of authors describe matter’s crudeness, bruteness, coldness or stupidity. ‘Dead matter’, ‘brutish’, ‘mechanical, lifeless matter’ is somehow cruelly used, so the vision goes, by second-rate scientists or their propagandists to strip the living world of its uniqueness, its singularity, and of course its freedom (Crocker, 1959, Hill, 1968). It is often and wrongly presented as ‘mechanistic materialism’ – with echoes of de-humanization and the hostility to the Scientific Revolution (which knew nothing of materialism!), e.g. of Merchant’s ‘Death of Nature’ sort, never very far off. This is a powerful Christian theme (in the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, in the Newtonian theologian Samuel Clarke and beyond: Overhoff, 2000). Here I aim to challenge this view, building on some aspects of Israel’s concept of the Radical Enlightenment (Israel, 2001), which has been controversial but which for my purposes is a useful claim about the dissemination of a kind of home-grown Spinozism which is sometimes turned into an ontology of the life sciences, an aspect Israel does not address (for further methodological discussion see Secrétan et al., eds., 2007 and Citton, 2006). First, I try and retrieve some ‘moments’ of radical Enlightenment materialism (including La Mettrie and Diderot, but also texts from the anonymous, clandestine tradition such as L’Âme Matérielle) and show how they are in fact defined by their recognition of the existence of organic beings, something also apparent in Diderot’s entry “Spinosiste” in the Encyclopédie. Second, I show how this ‘vital materialism’ in the Enlightenment is different from both earlier and later episodes, not least due to its ‘embodied’ character. Is this non-mechanistic materialism more accessible to ethics, or more of an ethics, than is usually thought? Here, the figure of the materialist as ‘laughing philosopher’ is relevant. Third, I reflect on what this implies for our image of the Enlightenment – as the implications are quite different from a Frankfurt School and/or Foucaldian vision of Enlightenment as ‘discipline’, regimentation and order (as still promoted for instance in Mayr, 1986). Notably, the presence at the heart of the Radical Enlightenment of a ‘vital materialism’ makes a difference – without this having to be taken, conversely, in the direction of a kind of holist vitalism “markedly at odds with the universalizing discourse of Encyclopedist materialism, with its insistence on the uniformity of nature and the universality of physical laws” (Williams, 2003, p. 177); vital materialism is still materialism. Its ethics tends towards the form of hedonism, but its most radical proponents (Diderot, La Mettrie and later Sade) disagree as to what this means.

In Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature (1753), Denis Diderot discusses what may be the novelty of a science of becoming and morphogenesis, consequent with the autopoietic of nature. Far from arriving at a positivist conception, as is common among materialistic philosophies, the author projects a science of the probable, the contingent, the transitory, which requires the combined efforts of all capacities of the knowing subject to carry out the ceaseless dialectic between the two poles of observation and interpretation. Imagination, intuition, prospect, and conjecture are summoned to accompany experiential activity, introducing an inventive dimension in science, whose freedom contributes to subverting the epistemological canon, blurring the rigidity of disciplinary boundaries, intensifying scientific discovery, and giving meaning to the cluster of research. Consequently, science becomes a plurality of texts , intersecting facts and conjectures, data and metaphors, protocol rigour and rhetorical procedures. The unusual character of this exuberance has led the main commentators on the work to presume that it is the fruit of philosophy's intervention, to which it would be fitting to add the step of creativity, unfeasible in scientific methodology. In contrast, we argue that, for the philosopher, those various processes are constitutive of the same scientific research, which finds in judgment the central faculty and in abduction the privileged process of discovery.

À la fin du XVIIe siècle, la dissolution du pacte allégorique semblait avoir à tout jamais disjoint la fable et le conte, la première prenant en charge seule un but didactique et le second se définissant comme un récit pur, sans intention de transmettre un quelconque message. Paradoxalement, de la fin du XVIIe siècle jusqu’aux années 1775, un nombre important de contes affichent, dès leurs seuils (titres, épigraphes, frontispices, préfaces), une fonction cognitive : on assiste à l’émergence d’une nouvelle catégorie du conte, qui se réconcilie avec les savoirs. Cette thèse vise à montrer que la portée philosophique et morale de ce sous-genre réside moins dans le message transmis que dans le mode de déchiffrement qu’il induit et dans la singularité de l’expérience qu’il fait vivre au lecteur. Les contes à visée morale et philosophique ne sont pas des illustrations d’une thèse préalable, ils déclenchent la réflexion du lecteur grâce à un dispositif narratif particulier, qui repose sur un pacte de lecture non plus allégorique, mais analogique : le lecteur est amené à faire des liens entre ce qui a priori est sans rapport, à prendre une posture critique à l’égard de tous les discours (notamment religieux, politiques, pseudo-scientifiques et même fictionnels), et à s’interroger sur lui-même, en somme à être philosophe, au sens où l’entendait le XVIIIe siècle. Après avoir repéré les constantes structurelles et thématiques de ces textes, aussi divers soient-ils, nous étudions l’entremêlement des discours philosophiques et moraux et de la fiction, dans les contes de Fénelon, Montesquieu, Saint-Hyacinthe, Crébillon, Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire et Marmontel.

Статья рассматривает повесть «Пиковая дама» А. С. Пушкина как сугубо метапоэтическое произведение, в котором присутствует обилие рассказов, «сочиняемых» разными «рассказчиками» - Чаплицким, Германном (в его письмах Лизе), и графиней, причём у каждого рассказа своя «тайна». Тема тайны рассказов возводится к 12-ой главе книги Дидро «Нескромные сокровища», где «сокровище» Маниллы повествует о том, как светские красавицы (в том числе его «хозяйка») погашают свои долги, накопленные за игровым столом. В «Пиковой даме» можно узреть немало интертекстуальных отсылок к книге Дидро. Между рассказами разных персонажей в пушкинском тексте наблюдается своего рода «борьба жанров».  Есть, во-первых, элементы готической повести об ужасах, упоминаемых графиней, героиней которой она невольно становится. Для графини Германн является антигероем повести об ужасах, а для Лизы героем сентиментального романа в письмах. Она ошибается: он антигерой. Тем не менее, её надежда благополучно выйти замуж сбывается.  Однако ключевой жанр здесь – анекдот, или шутка. Про рассказы о своей «тайне» графиня говорит: «Это была шутка». Этим словом она определяет не только ту выдумку о волшебном чередовании карт – тройка, семёрка, туз –, которой она, видимо, усыпила подозрения мужа, но и жанр всей повести, которая является шуткой в стиле Дидро. В конце статьи по поводу шутки как жанра приводится формула Гёте об «очень серьёзно намеренных шутках».

To whom do you pretend to make believe that a man can be the property of a sovereign, that a child can be the property of his father, that a woman can be the property of her husband, that a servant can be the property of his master, that a negro can be the property of the colonist? (Diderot, History of the Two Indies. OC III, 740).
This paper addresses the issue how Diderot displays a free analysis thanks to anonymity in the History of Two Indies. I claim that the author criticizes without any roundabout style colonialism and slavery, focusing first on the fragments of this work attributed to Diderot. Second, I tackle the fact that Diderot argues in this work for the right to hospitality and breaks down the consequences stemming from trade under an inspiring view for contemporary analyses. I also attempt to cast light on Diderot’s view of other peoples and cultures traditionally considered ‘wild’, drawing a conclusion that they are useful to identify the boundaries of European bourgeois moral codes, usually considered ‘civilizised’. In this vein I also address in the paper the Addendum to the Journey of Bougainville, a key writing for appraising issues as anticolonialism and cosmopolitanism in Diderot’s thought.

Si le XVIIIe siècle passe pour une oasis colorée, sa littérature reflète peu cette polychromie, contrairement à celle du XIXe siècle. Ce décalage entre imaginaire littéraire et culture matérielle est le point de départ de cet ouvrage qui pose les premiers jalons pour l’étude des couleurs de la littérature.

La signification que d'Alembert confère au terme « méchanique », et dont l'Encyclopédie peut être le moyen d'une diffusion élargie au-delà des cercles académiques, résulte d'une élaboration critique des concepts de la science contemporaine du mouvement, qui est une abstraction prélevée sur la théorie des machines simples qui correspondait encore au sens de méchanique pour Descartes ou

Gerhardt Stenger : The dating of Diderot's early works. The generally accepted dating of Diderot's early works, which places the writing of De la suffisance de la religion naturelle and La Promenade du sceptique after that of the Pensées philosophiques, is unsatisfactory when one studies closely their author's intellectual formation. There is no serious argument against dating these two texts before the publication of the Pensées philosophiques , and there are at least three arguments in favour of this hypothesis : the development of Diderot's religious thought, which progresses from the defence of natural religion to sceptical atheism ; the gradual abandoning of a morality inspired by Shaftesbury, for "moral determinism" as expounded in the letter to Landois ; the replacement of classical philosophical discourse reflecting a fundamentally ordered world by a new style representing in its destructured structures the permanent creation of the Universe.

Gerhardt Stenger : Two unknown manuscripts of Diderot : madame de la Carlière and Sur les femmes. The Vienna National Library possesses two Diderot manuscripts that have hitherto escaped the notice of editors of his works. They are intermediate versions of Madame de la Carlière and Sur les femmes which are worthy of the attention of specialists, as not only do the manuscripts inform us about the elaboration or the different stages of their composition, but in addition their close connection gives us a clearer understanding of the relationship between Diderot's writings for Grimm's Correspondance littéraire and his true literary productions.

As the key term in Michael Fried’s criticism and art history, theatricality remains an influential and contentious concept. In defending its validity, Fried has repudiated social historical interpretations and alternatives, arguing for the independence of his thesis from these concerns. This essay nevertheless proposes that an anxiety regarding the effects of capitalism on art constitutes the disavowed kernel of Fried’s theory of theatricality. It does so in three ways: first, by examining the places in Fried’s critical and historical writing where theatricality is shadowed by exploitative relationships; second, by tracing theatricality back to its source, the art criticism of Denis Diderot, where it was closely linked to concerns regarding profit-seeking and exploitation in drawing, theater, painting, and patronage; and third, by investigating the ways in which the work Fried called ‘literalist’ might have provoked similar misgivings. On the basis of this evidence, Fried’s argument is shown to be driven and distorted by a political unconscious structured around the very issues its author has consistently dismissed as immaterial to art history. Theatricality is Fried’s way of doubly shielding art from the effects of capitalism—displacing them onto an aesthetic category, and deeming that category art’s ultimate liability and challenge.

The best-known intellectual persona of the French Enlightenment, the philosophe , is typically associated not with the vicissitudes of sensory, corporeal existence, but with reason, truth-telling, and the pursuit of social and political reform. However, like many other aspects of eighteenth-century culture, the fi gure of the thinker was deeply infl ected by sensibility's rise as a concept that bridged body, mind, and milieu. This chapter focuses on the absorbed thinker as a type to reconstruct what sensibility was held to do in the mind and body during the act of intense cerebration. It examines the ambiguous affective and sensory state which various moralists and physicians ascribed to thinkers observed or imagined in the state of absorption. It then considers some of the purposes to which Denis Diderot put the fi gure, focusing particularly on the absentminded geometer characters that appeared in his fi ctional dialogue Le Rêve de d'Alembert (1769) and in the Eléments de physiologie (1778). Finally, it considers what those depictions imply, both for Diderot's views on the thinking process and for existing historiographical accounts of sensibility in the Enlightenment era.

Le polype, ou hydre d'eau douce, est un petit être extraordinaire: on peut tout lui infliger—le décapiter, lui mutiler les bras, le couper en morceaux, le gaver, l’affamer, l’obliger à manger un autre polype ou le retourner comme un gant: il en ressort toujours entier, vivant, et en état de se reproduire. On ne peut que s’émerveiller avec tout le XVIIIe siècle de la malléabilité du polype: sa régénérescence à partir d’un morceau de lui-même avec Trembley, et les conséquences en philosophie matérialiste telles que la continuité des règnes et l’inséparabilité de la vie et de la matière qu’en ont tiré Bonnet et La Mettrie. Diderot lui aussi exploite le polype dans "Le Rêve de D’Alembert", qui lui permet d’élaborer une spéculation scientifique, à savoir le principe du clonage et de la division cellulaire. Dans sa "Correspondance", Diderot présente enfin les particularités régénératrices du polype comme figure de sa textualité, et sa conception du texte comme une matière organique vivante et douée du pouvoir de se reproduire à partir d’elle-même.

In 1749, while on the road to Vincennes to visit his friend Diderot in prison, Rousseau had an inspirational experience that prove to be a deciding moment in his life story. In his many autobiographical writings, he would time and again interpret this event as the seminal point of his identity as a writer. Taking the conflicting contemporary interpretations of the Vincennes episode as a starting point, this article asks in what way modern, post-subjectivist theories of the self can enrich our understanding of historical events, while at the same time providing answers to wider questions concerning the ways in which historically changing and contextually specific forms of what it means to be a self are constructed, intepreted, articulated and ›put into practice‹. To this end, Rousseau’s ›illumination‹ and its subsequent interpretations are interpreted in the light of contemporary controversies over the identity of the writer that developed against the background of fundamental changes in the social and economic structure of the literary field.

Denis Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau contains many intriguing passages that reference music and musical matters—from mimed performances and popular folk tunes to musical theories and broader aesthetic debates on the imitative functions of music. In this essay, I argue that the title character, Rameau’s Nephew, performs a kind of ‘musical dialogue’, which brings to life Diderot’s musical metaphors for human physiology, emotion, and cognition, present in his other writings. The Nephew performs music not only to touch readers through their many senses (i.e. reader’s sensibility) but also to intone—to give musical form to—Diderot’s ideas of human physiology and understanding (i.e. a philosophy of sensibility). The Nephew transforms the dialogue into an interactive multimedia experience. His musical passages, I believe, are intended to demonstrate the influence of sound (and sight) on physical feelings and emotions. The Nephew’s imagined music then activates for these readers voluntary responses as well as involuntary reactions. In addition to the interactive function of the Nephew’s musical reference, his medleys also serve as a dynamic three-dimensional model of human cognitive and physiological processes, thus setting philosophical dialogue to music and translating into sound Diderot’s theories of human experience and understanding.

With the notion of hieroglyph, Diderot tries to demonstrate that listening to poetry and music involves a schematic indication that, as in a rough draft, helps to produce images. Pleasure is generated by the recognition of an ideogrammatical representation which is impressed on the memory thanks to the relationships it establishes between sounds.

Je traiterai de l’« hétérodoxie » de la construction biologique chez Diderot : de sa construction conceptuelle du vivant qui serait l’équivalent « clandestin » d’une contribution à la biologie. Mais justement en tant que c’est une forme clandestine de la biologie, elle ne se laisse pas transformer en épisode appartenant à un récit, progressif, linéaire ou non, de l’histoire de la science du vivant. Le matérialisme d’inspiration clandestine de Diderot, tel qu’il apparait par exemple dans l’article « Spinosiste » de l’Encyclopédie, n’est ni une métaphysique chimique ou chimiatrique à la Stahl, ni, dans l’attention qu’il porte au vivant, une contribution à la biologie comme chez Maupertuis ou Lamarck.

On se demande parfois ce qui a bien pu pousser Diderot à choisir une forme littéraire pour exprimer ses idées (Dieckmann CXLII-CXLII) Dialogue defines Denis Diderot's oeuvre. It structures almost all of his writings from the earliest to the latest and appears in different forms. His youthful and relatively free translation of Shaftesbury speaks back to the text itself. The Encyclopédie's cross-referenced entries converse with each other. His more mature contes nest dialogues within dialogues. Diderot's predilection for this literary form has rightly been emphasized and widely theorized. Herbert Dieckmann maintains that Diderot turns to dialogue to fulfill a personal need, for it "permet à Diderot de saisir le mouvement spontané de ses pensées" (Dieckmann CXLVI). Peter France contends that

Continuité et rupture en histoire de la philosophie : le cas de l'épicurisme selon Diderot Résumé À la toute fin de l'article « Épicuréisme ou Épicurisme » de l'Encyclopédie, après une adaptation très particulière de l'information qu'il a trouvée dans l'Historia Critica Philosophiae de Brucker, Diderot écrit une brève histoire de l'épicurisme moderne se concluant par cette phrase significative : « en quelque lieu & en quelque tems que ce soit, la secte épicurienne n'a jamais eu plus d'éclat qu'en France, & sur-tout pendant le siecle dernier. » Ma contribution prend prétexte cette affirmation pour essayer de penser ce que signifie, pour Diderot, constituer une secte épicurienne aux XVII e et XVIII e siècles. Il devient alors possible de clarifier ce que sont les modalités du rapport à l'histoire de la philosophie impliquées dans cette affirmation, et le sens que Diderot prête à la filiation et à l'héritages philosophiques. Penser l'épicurisme moderne devient une manière de contester le récit simplificateur d'une modernité qui ne se définirait que par la rupture avec le passé.

Dans cette contribution, je m’attarde à la manière dont l'intérêt de la philosophie des Lumières pour la métaphysique est rendu visible dans certaines entrées de l’Encyclopédie expressément mises sous les rubriques « Philosophie » et « Histoire de la philosophie », et plus particulièrement à l’une d’entre elles, à savoir l’entrée SCHOLASTIQUES, laquelle a l’intérêt de mettre sur la scène de l’histoire le drame du rapt de la métaphysique par la théologie. Autre manière de dire que le devenir « ontothéologique » de la métaphysique, comme moment de l’histoire de l’esprit humain, est bel et bien l’histoire de rapports de forces politiques et institutionnelles dont la résolution n’est pas nécessairement conditionnée par un dévoilement progressif de la vérité

Vérité sexuelle et mensonge légal : « jouissance et possession » dans l'Encyclopédie selon Diderot, ou : deviendrons-nous galants, éclairés et heureux ? Sophie audidière En cherchant la philosophie de l'Encyclopédie dans l'Encyclopédie, que cherchet-on ? Toute encyclopédie demande : que savons-nous, savons-nous seulement ce que nous savons et ce que nous ignorons ? Que pensons-nous, et là encore, le savons-nous ? L'Encyclopédie des Lumières demande plus spécifiquement : en vertu de quoi la lecture d'un « dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers », lecture non linéaire à divers titres, décrit-elle pour le lecteur un parcours de « lumières » ? Est-ce d'apprendre ce que nous ignorions ? D'apprendre ce que nous savions sans le savoir ? Est-ce d'apprendre pourquoi et comment nous en sommes venus à savoir ceci ou à penser cela ? En une phrase, l'Encyclopédie pose la question : quelles sont les lumières propres à l'Encyclopédie, dans le sens simple d'un éclaircissement de nos vues qui soit synonyme d'émancipation, et non seulement d'information ? Diderot pose cette question très simplement et y répond, pour une part, tout aussi clairement. Dans un premier temps, je m'appuierai sur les résultats les plus solides de la recherche sur cette question pour décrire rapidement le faire encyclopédique diderotien. On verra ainsi se combiner l'entreprise de Diderot en tant que « métaphysicien » des sciences et des arts, que « grammairien », et qu'historien de la philosophie, pour produire un double mouvement d'ajustement du langage, ou de la manière de parler, et d'ajustement des concepts, ou de la manière de penser. Puis je suivrai un parcours de lecture incarnant et peut-être même fondant ce double mouvement, en commençant non pas avec les articles IDÉE, ou LANGUE, ou ETYMOLOGIE 1 , par exemple, mais avec l'article EPICURÉISME 1 L'article est de Turgot. Très intéressant pour notre propos interrogeant l'articulation entre pratique philologique, pratique philosophique et projet encyclopédique, il a déjà été examiné sous ce point de vue par Georges Benrekassa, dans « De l'Encyclopédie aux encyclopédies : Audidière Sophie ou EPICURISME, parce que Diderot écrit : « on naît épicurien » (V, 784). Je philosophie native voire naturelle ? Dès lors, quel mouvement d'ajustement des termes et des idées suit, historiquement, cette philosophie ? Que devient-elle, et nous avec elle ? Je voudrais ainsi faire apparaître comment l'histoire de la philosophie et l'ajustement progressif de la langue sont accompagnés par une autre histoire, celle de l'ajustement de nos affections. Pour Diderot, nous pensons dans des structures qui surgissent de nos expériences affectives. Le parcours que je propose à partir de l'article EPICURÉISME ou EPICURISME, dans des articles de Diderot, est une recherche de cette histoire. Il suggère que l'institution des langues, tout imparfaites qu'elles soient, et le début de l'histoire de nos idées, trouvent leur origine commune dans le fait civilisationnel (au sens où il marque l'entrée dans la civilisation) de la GALANTERIE, montrera aussi comment il se fait que nos langues fourchent et que nos pensées errent, en même temps que nos liens d'attachement se transforment en chaînes d'appropriation et en domination. Le discours sur la naissance de nos attachements amoureux englobe une genèse de la langue imparfaite que nous parlons autant qu'une genèse de la domination. D'une manière incidente, cette proposition de lecture fera apparaître une présence peut-être inaperçue de Rousseau dans l'Encyclopédie 2 , ici le Rousseau de l'Essai sur l'origine des langues 3 . proposer et communiquer un état du savoir », RDE, 18-1, 1995, p. 157-169. 2 Voir Marie Leca-Tsiomis, Écrire l'Encyclopédie. Diderot : de l'usage des dictionnaires à la grammaire philosophique, SVEC, 375, 1999, ch. 25. Vérité sexuelle et mensonge légal 1. L'Encyclopédie de Diderot : métaphysique, grammaire, histoire de la philosophie Dans l'article ENCYCLOPÉDIE tout d'abord, il apparaît rapidement que le rassemblement des connaissances que décrit spontanément le terme « encyclopédie » est structuré par une ambition que Diderot qualifie de métaphysique. L'ambition d'un « dictionnaire raisonné » ou philosophique, peut-on lire sous la plume de Diderot, est de donner les raisons des arts et des sciences, au sens suivant : pourquoi les arts, mécaniques autant que libéraux, sont-ils comme ils sont et fontils comme ils font ? Pourquoi les sciences sont-elles comme elles sont et font-elles comme elles font ? La réponse à ces questions constitue ce que Diderot nomme la « métaphysique » des arts et des sciences, dans l'article MÉTAPHYSIQUE : « C'est la science des raisons des choses. Tout a sa métaphysique et sa pratique : la pratique, sans la raison de la pratique, et la raison sans l'exercice, ne forment qu'une science imparfaite. Interrogez un peintre, un poète, un musicien, un géomètre, et vous le forcerez à rendre compte de ses opérations, c'est-à-dire à en venir à la métaphysique de son art » (X, 440) En l'absence de prise de conscience d'une telle métaphysique, l'homme de lettres, le savant, l'artiste, marchent au hasard ou plus exactement, la métaphysique d'une pratique étant toujours déjà à l'oeuvre dans les opérations de la pratique, ils marchent dans l'ignorance de ce qu'ils font et de ce qu'ils sont. Dans ce Audidière Sophie ce que nous savions sans le savoir 4

Cet article montre que la philosophie de l'éducation de Diderot trouve son sens dans le cadre d'une pensée de la civilisation, au sein de laquelle elle théorise le rôle de l'institution publique d'éducation. À partir d'une analyse critique du pouvoir de l'argent dans les sociétés modernes, et d'une histoire comparée de l'éducation en France et en Russie, Diderot propose un changement d'échelle et l'articulation d'une réflexion proprement scolaire (curriculum, corpus, pédagogie, statut des maîtres, organisation et contenu des temps scolaires et non scolaires…) à une philosophie politique encourageant l'autorité républicaine et à une philosophie sociale pensant la distribution des emplois publics comme moteur d'une méritocratie. L'ensemble constitue une défense de « l'utilité » générale de l'éducation publique, qui n'est ni utopiste ni platement utilitaire.

El presente estudio busca establecer un punto de partida para la comprensión de la no-vela filosófica de los philosophes. No pretende ser un estudio analítico o formal sino sintético o contextual en sus aspectos esenciales. Por consiguiente, es incompleto y aporético. La introducción ofrece los rasgos principales del ambiente intelectual sobre el cual se mueven los philosophes. Un segundo apartado se ocupa del llamado proyecto de la ilustración; es decir, de la imagen distorsionada que se ha construido sobre las presuntas aspiraciones políticas e intelectuales de los enciclopedistas. En un siguiente apartado, muestra el referente socrático del "nuevo" sentido que tiene la palabra "philosophe". Y en un apartado posterior se relaciona este nuevo significado en la ironía como recurso retórico-en el sentido de Friedrich Schlegel y Paul de Man-en las novelas de Diderot y Voltaire. Un último apartado se ocupa de la Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse de Rousseau como contrapunto con la ironía de sus amigos-enemigos.
Palabras clave: Novela filosófica, proyecto de la Ilustración, ironía.

The materialism of La Mettrie and Diderot has been the object of some recent reevaluations, most of which focus on their conception of matter, and how this changes, notably, our idea of a predominantly mechanistic materialism in the period. Less attention has been paid to their conception of liberty, or conversely, their denial thereof. Indeed, of the typical, and strident objections to materialism in terms of human freedom, building on the usual view of materialism as a necropolis of 'dead matter', two core objections emerge: that materialism reduces humans to deterministic, passive, sets of atoms, and that it is an immoralism. In this paper I focus chiefly on the second claim, and turn to Diderot's own objections to La Metttrie in this regard. Both philosophers share a large number of materialist tenets, but Diderot is upset by the ethical consequences La Mettrie draws. My aim is not to defend one or the other of their materialist approaches to ethics (and liberty) but to reflect on the aporias involved therein, in considering whether 'libertinage' is a necessary consequence of materialism.