Licence bee diderot biography
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But at the same time it is hard not to give equal weight to a less rational sort of motive.
Havens, George R. The Age of Ideas. (letter of 15 October 1759, translation C. Wolfe)
This image of a kind of eternity in which “loving molecules” gradually return to one another, impelled by a residual consciousness of the love present in their “parent bodies”, resonates with the powerful rendition he gives in the first dialogue of the Rêve of the thought experiment of the statue.
doi:10.5840/gfpj20002215
As a nineteenth-century commentator put it, after this date “writings hostile to religion appeared and multiplied, and a war broke out between skepticism and faith” (Wilson 1972: 94–95, quoting an editor of Barbier 1857: vol. In his nun's confessional tale Diderot's penetrating medical insight shows us how illness, sexual perversion, and madness are the ultimate consequences of a refusal to obey what he calls nature.
Nevertheless, one of his first publications was the translation of James’ Medicinal Dictionary (1745), and in addition to his enormous activity as the chief editor of the Encyclopédie, which heavily features medical entries, sometimes with his editorial interventions, he was also a serious student of chemistry, including “vital chemistry” (Pépin 2012).
I recall how I was once concerned with this sort of metaphysical anatomy, and had found that of all the senses, the eye was the most superficial, the ear the most proud, smell the most pleasurable, and taste the deepest, most philosophical sense. It has been said of him that he was singularly fortunate in two respects, in that he had never fallen in with a bad man or a poor book.
This is Diderot the editor of the Encyclopedia, and here again he strives to reveal and divulge secrets to the general public. But nowhere had it been lively, fruitful, searching, if I may so express it, it had not found its soul. Born communicative as much as it is possible for a man to be, it is too bad that I was not born more inventive; I would have told my ideas to the first comer.
In 1746 he published Philosophical Thoughts, which discussed the relationship between nature and religion. Jacques le fataliste, for example, is a kind of anti-novel that thwarts the arrival of naturalized realism and credible illusion at every turn even as it narrates a bawdy and frolicking story.
But his articulation of all of these in a materialist project does not belong to or open onto an episode amongst others in the history of science. In 1734 Diderot decided to seek his fortune by writing. This short piece of “philosophy of physics” includes a polemic aimed at all those who define matter as inert and homogeneous (latter-day Cartesians).
He excelled in taking to himself for a time, and at his pleasure, the mind of another person; in gathering inspiration from it, often to better effect than that other himself had done; in arousing the enthusiasm not only of his own brain, but of his heart; and at such times he was the great modern journalist, the Homer of the profession, intelligent, ardent, effusive, eloquent, never at home, always abroad; or if it happened that he received others at his home and amid his own ideas, then he was the most open-hearted, the most hospitable of mortals, the most friendly to all men and to everything, and gave to all his circle, readers no less than authors or artists, not a lesson but a fête.
Still an unsensing mass, for the seed itself is merely an inert, crude fluid.