Denis Diderot (1713 – 1784)

[KALKI]

Denis Diderot (French: [dəni didʁo]; 5 October 1713 – 31 July 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic and writer. He was a prominent figure during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor and contributor to the Encyclopédie along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert.

Diderot also contributed to literature, notably with Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and his Master), which was influenced by Laurence Sterne's novel Tristam Shandy in challenging conventions regarding novels and their structure and content,[1] while also examining philosophical ideas about free will. Diderot is also known as the author of the dialogue Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew), upon which many articles and sermons about consumer desire have been based.





Denis Diderot was born in Langres, Champagne, and began his formal education at a Jesuit collège in Langres.





n° 9 de la place dans le centre ville de Langres in the background on the right side the birthplace of Denis Diderot
His parents were Didier Diderot (1685–1759) a cutler, maître coutelier and his wife Angélique Vigneron (1677–1748). Three of five siblings survived to adulthood, Denise Diderot (1715–1797) and their youngest brother Pierre-Didier Diderot (1722–1787), and finally their sister Angélique Diderot (1720–1749). According to Arthur McCandless Wilson, Denis Diderot greatly admired his sister Denise, sometimes referring to her as "a female Socrates".[2]

In 1732 Denis Diderot earned a master of arts degree in philosophy. Then he entered the Collège d'Harcourt in Paris. He abandoned the idea of entering the clergy and decided instead to study law. His study of law was short-lived however and in 1734 Diderot decided to become a writer. Because of his refusal to enter one of the learned professions, he was disowned by his father, and for the next ten years he lived a bohemian existence.[3]

In 1742 he befriended Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In 1743 he further alienated his father by marrying Antoinette Champion (1710–1796), a devout Roman Catholic. The match was considered inappropriate due to Champion's low social status, poor education, fatherless status and lack of a dowry. She was about three years older than Diderot. The marriage, in October 1743 produced one surviving child, a girl. Her name was Angélique, after both Diderot's dead mother and sister. The death of his sister, a nun, from overwork in the convent may have affected Diderot's opinion of religion. She is assumed to have been the inspiration for his novel about a nun, La Religieuse, in which he depicts a woman who is forced to enter a convent where she suffers at the hands of the other nuns in the community.[3]

Diderot had affairs with the writer Madeleine de Puisieux and with Sophie Volland (1716–1784). His letters to Sophie Volland contain some of the most vivid of all the insights that we have of the daily life of the philosophic circle of Paris during this time period.

Though his work was broad and rigorous, it did not bring Diderot riches. He secured none of the posts that were occasionally given to needy men of letters; he could not even obtain the bare official recognition of merit which was implied by being chosen a member of the Académie française. When the time came for him to provide a dowry for his daughter, he saw no alternative than to sell his library. When Empress Catherine II of Russia heard of his financial troubles she commissioned an agent in Paris to buy the library. She then requested that the philosopher retain the books in Paris until she required them, and act as her librarian with a yearly salary. Between October 1773 and March 1774, the sick Diderot spent a few months at the empress's court in Saint Petersburg.[3][4]





Diderot's travel from Paris to Saint Petersburg in 1773–1774. The blue line marks the outward from 11 June 1773 until to 8 October 1773, and the red line marks the return journey 5 March 1774 to 21 October 1774.
Diderot died of pulmonary thrombosis in Paris on 31 July 1784, and was buried in the city's Église Saint-Roch. His heirs sent his vast library to Catherine II, who had it deposited at the National Library of Russia. He has several times been denied burial in the Panthéon with other French notables,[5] but the French government did recently announce the possibility of memorializing him in this fashion, on the 300th anniversary of his birth (October 2013). For the moment, however, this idea seems to have been tabled.[6]

Early works[edit]

Diderot's earliest works included a translation of Temple Stanyan's History of Greece (1743); with two colleagues, François-Vincent Toussaint and Marc-Antoine Eidous, he produced a translation of Robert James's Medicinal Dictionary[7] (1746–1748); at about the same time he published a free rendering of Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit (1745), with some original notes of his own. In 1746 he wrote his first original work: the Pensées philosophiques,[8] and he added to this a short complementary essay on the sufficiency of natural religion. He then composed a volume of bawdy stories Les bijoux indiscrets (1748); in later years he repented this work. In 1747 he wrote the Promenade du sceptique, an allegory pointing first at the extravagances of Catholicism; second, at the vanity of the pleasures of the world which is the rival of the church; and third, at the desperate and unfathomable uncertainty of the philosophy which professes to be so high above both church and world.

Diderot's celebrated Lettre sur les aveugles à l'usage de ceux qui voient ("Letter on the Blind") (1749), introduced him to the world as a daringly original thinker. The subject is a discussion of the interrelation between man's reason and the knowledge acquired through perception (the five senses). The title, "Letter on the Blind For the Use of Those Who See", also evoked some ironic doubt about who exactly were "the blind" under discussion. In the essay, blind English mathematician Nicholas Saunderson[9] argues that, since knowledge derives from the senses, mathematics is the only form of knowledge that both he and a sighted person can agree on. It is suggested that the blind could be taught to read through their sense of touch (a later essay, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, considered the case of a similar deprivation in the deaf and mute). What makes the Lettre sur les aveugles so remarkable, however, is its distinct, if undeveloped, presentation of the theory of variation and natural selection.[10]


This powerful essay ... revolves around a remarkable deathbed scene in which a dying blind philosopher, Saunderson, rejects the arguments of a providential God during his last hours. Saunderson's arguments are those of a Neo-Spinozist, Naturalist, and Fatalist, using a sophisticated notion of the self-generation and natural evolution of species without Creation or supernatural intervention. The notion of "thinking matter" is upheld and the "argument from design" discarded ... as hollow and unconvincing. The work appeared anonymously ... and was vigorously suppressed by the authorities. Diderot, who had been under police surveillance since 1747, was swiftly identified as the author ... and was imprisoned for some months at Vincennes, where he was visited almost daily by Rousseau, at the time his closest and most assiduous ally.

After signing a document of submission and promising never to write anything prejudicial against Catholicism again, resulting in his most controversial works being published only after his death, Diderot was released from the dungeons of the Vincennes fortress three months later. Subsequently, in collaboration with d'Alembert, he embarked on his greatest project, the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers

[KALKI]

Denis Diderot (1713-84) he was a prominent French figure in what became known as The Enlightenment, and was the editor-in-chief of the famous Encyclopédie. He was also a novelist, satirist, and dramatist. Diderot was enormously influential in shaping the rationalistic spirit of the 18th century.

He suggested in his article on India that the “sciences may be more ancient in India than in Egypt.”

(source: Searching for Vedic India – By Devamrita Swami p. 164).