Denis Diderot

Denis Diderot was the animating intelligence behind the Encyclopédie — the largest publishing project of the 18th century — which he co-edited with Jean le Rond d'Alembert from 1751 until its completion in 1772, commissioning, editing, and writing hundreds of articles while navigating royal censorship, publisher cowardice, and d'Alembert's eventual withdrawal. Imprisoned in 1749 at Vincennes for his Lettre sur les aveugles (Letter on the Blind), which drew materialist conclusions from the experience of congenital blindness, he emerged convinced that intellectual honesty required concealment behind the Encyclopédie's collective anonymous authority. His philosophical writing — including Le Neveu de Rameau and Jacques le fataliste, neither published in his lifetime — explored materialism, determinism, and the instability of moral categories with a radicalism that anticipated 19th-century secular thought. His warm correspondence with Catherine the Great of Russia, whom he visited in Saint Petersburg in 1773–1774 attempting to advise her on reform, illustrated the Enlightenment's paradox: the philosopher of freedom serving the most powerful autocrat in Europe, who found him delightful but ungovernable.

• Lived: 1713 CE – 1784 CE
• Nationality: french
• Roles: philosopher, writer, encyclopédiste, art critic

Related

• The Ancien Régime
• Publication of the Encyclopédie (1751–1772)