Diderot Studies

Diderot Studies
Author: Diana Guiragossian
Publisher: Librairie Droz
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2000
Genre:
ISBN: 9782600004589

Diderot Studies

Diderot Studies
Author: Otis Fellows
Publisher: Librairie Droz
Total Pages: 136
Release: 1965
Genre:
ISBN: 9782600039376

Framed Narratives

Framed Narratives
Author: Jay Caplan
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 143
Release: 1985-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 145290040X

The Atheist's Bible: Diderot's 'Éléments de physiologie'

The Atheist's Bible: Diderot's 'Éléments de physiologie'
Author: Caroline Warman
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2020-11-16
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1783748990

‘Love is harder to explain than hunger, for a piece of fruit does not feel the desire to be eaten’: Denis Diderot’s Éléments de physiologie presents a world in flux, turning on the relationship between man, matter and mind. In this late work, Diderot delves playfully into the relationship between bodily sensation, emotion and perception, and asks his readers what it means to be human in the absence of a soul. The Atheist’s Bible challenges prevailing scholarly views on Diderot’s Éléments, asserting its contemporary philosophical importance, and prompting its readers to inspect more closely this little-known and little-studied work. In this timely volume, Warman establishes the place of Diderot’s Éléments in the trajectory of materialist theories of nature and the mind stretching back to Epicurus and Lucretius, and explores the fascinating reasons behind scholarly neglect of this seminal work. In turn, Warman outlines the hitherto unacknowledged dissemination and reception of Diderot’s Éléments, demonstrating how Diderot’s Éléments was circulated in manuscript-form as early as the 1790s, thus showing how the text came to influence the next generations of materialist thinkers. This book is accompanied by a digital edition of Jacques-André Naigeon’s Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot (1823), a work which, Warman argues, represents the first publication of Diderot’s Éléments, long before its official publication date of 1875. The Atheist’s Bible constitutes a major contribution to the field of Diderot studies, and will be of further interest to scholars and students of materialist natural philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment and beyond.

Diderot and the Metamorphosis of Species

Diderot and the Metamorphosis of Species
Author: Mary Efrosini Gregory
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2007
Genre: Evolution in literature
ISBN: 0415955513

First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Order and Chance

Order and Chance
Author: Geoffrey Bremner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 1983-09-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0521250080

This study discovers a pattern to Diderot's thinking, a fundamental dualism attributable largely to the attitudes and assumptions of the time and giving a common structure to his ideas and writing. Geoffrey Bremner draws widely on Diderot's works in studying his ideas on perception and action, aesthetics, ethics and politics, as well as his plays and fiction. The subtlety of the textual analysis and the analogies Dr Bremner draws provide a convincing and illuminating argument for his interpretation. He supports this but emphasising the intellectual circumstances in which Diderot wrote and demonstrating his links to other eighteenth- and seventeenth-century writers. His study will therefore make a valuable contribution to the reassessment of the period that is currently underway, as well as to the central, elusive problem presented by Diderot's thought itself.

Evolutionism in Eighteenth-century French Thought

Evolutionism in Eighteenth-century French Thought
Author: Mary Efrosini Gregory
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781433103735

This book examines how eight eighteenth-century French theorists - Maillet, Montesquieu, La Mettrie, Buffon, Maupertuis, Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire - addressed evolutionism. Each thinker laid down a building block that would eventually open the door to the mutability of species and a departure from the long-held belief that the chain of beings is fixed. This book describes how the philosophes established a triune relationship among contemporary scientific discoveries, random creationism propelled by the motive and conscious properties of matter, and the notion of the chain of being, along with its corollaries, plenitude and continuity. Also addressed is the contemporary debate over whether apes could ever be taught to speak as well as the issue of race and the family of man.

Enlightenment and Pathology

Enlightenment and Pathology
Author: Anne C. Vila
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780801858093

If moods are as contagious as colds, and wickedness as debilitating as a bad diet, inquiries into assorted discourses in 18th-century France still have much to tell. Author Anne Vila shows that multiple junctures between the body and the mind promoted a steady commerce of speculation and discussion between science and the social salons of the time. 9 illustrations.