San Antonio College Library

As editor of the vast French "Encyclopedia", Denis Diderot (1713-84) had a unique vantage-point on the world of the Enlightenment. This book takes account of the full range of Diderot's writing, from politics to the theatre, from physiology to painting. It stresses the critical impulse which lies at the heart of his work, goes on to examine his attempts at a coherent new system, founded on a natural order, and then looks at the ways in which the variety...

The encyclopédistes were a group of 18th-century writers in France who compiled and wrote the Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert. More than a hundred encyclopédistes have been identified. Many were part of the intellectual group known as the philosophes. They promoted the advancement of science and secular thought and supported tolerance, rationality, and open-mindedness of the Enlightenment.

As a philosopher Diderot speculated on free will and held a completely materialistic view of the universe; he suggested all human behavior is determined by heredity. He therefore warned his fellow philosophers against an overemphasis on mathematics and against the blind optimism that sees in the growth of physical knowledge an automatic social and human progress. He rejected the Idea of Progress. In his opinion, the aim of progressing through technology...