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5 unusual facts about Denis Diderot


Denis Diderot

In his youth, Diderot was originally a follower of Voltaire and his deist Anglomanie, but gradually moved away from this line of thought towards materialism and atheism, a move which was finally realised in 1747 in the philosophical debate in the second part of his La Promenade du sceptique (1747).

André Le Breton, a bookseller and printer, approached Diderot with a project for the publication of a translation of Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences into French, first undertaken by the Englishman John Mills, and followed by the German Gottfried Sellius.

Early knowledge of the Pacific Northwest

In 1755 Denis Diderot published a version of Delisle's map in the Encyclopedié.

Louis Émond

Suddenly, after a review by Réginald Martel, the respected critic with La Presse, who wrote: "Our national literature is in need of his immense talent," Émond found himself in the media spotlight amid comparisons with Hubert Aquin and the observation that his libertine tone echoed the spirit of Denis Diderot.

Old Crows / Young Cardinals

It is a quote from philosopher Denis Diderot's poem Les Éleuthéromanes, translated to: And his hands would plait the priest's entrails, for want of a rope, to strangle kings.


Café Philosophique

Certain intellectuals that have frequented the cafe for philosophical discussions throughout history have been Victor Hugo, Paul Verlaine, Honoré de Balzac Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, François-Marie Arouet, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Georges Danton, Jean-Paul Marat, Honoré de Balzac and Denis Diderot amongst others.

Ceci n'est pas un conte

Ceci n’est pas un conte, French for "This is not a story", is a story by the French author Denis Diderot written in 1772.

David Riazanov

Riazanov also edited the works of other authors including Diderot, Feuerbach, and Hegel.

Diderot effect

The term was coined by anthropologist and scholar of consumption patterns Grant McCracken in 1988, and is named after the French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–84) who first described the effect in an essay.

Discourse on the Arts and Sciences

Rousseau's friend Denis Diderot had been imprisoned at Vincennes for writing a work questioning the idea of a providential God.

Georges Pichard

Toward the end of his life, Pichard adapted classic erotic stories such as Les Exploits d'un jeune Don Juan by Guillaume Apollinaire, The Kama-Sutra by Vatsyayana, Trois filles de leur mère by Pierre Louÿs, La Religieuse by Denis Diderot and Germinal by Émile Zola.

Guillaume-François Rouelle

He started a public course in his laboratory in 1738 where he taught many students among whom were Denis Diderot, Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, Joseph Proust and Antoine-Augustin Parmentier.

Ivan Stojanović

He wrote many detached papers on various literary subjects, including the writings of St. Augustine, Aristophanes ("The Clouds"), Petronius, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich Schiller, Voltaire, Denis Diderot ("Rameau's Nephew"), Paul Louis Courier, Petar II Petrović Njegoš, and Edmondo De Amicis, his contemporary.

Jules Janin

Janin traveled (picking up in one of his journeys a country house at Lucca in a lottery), and wrote accounts of his travels; he wrote numerous tales and novels, and composed many other works, including Fin d'un monde et du neveu de Rameau (1861), in which, under the guise of a sequel to Diderot's work, he showed his familiarity with the late 18th century.

Materialism

There followed the materialist and atheist Jean Meslier, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, Paul-Henri Thiry Baron d'Holbach, Denis Diderot, and other French Enlightenment thinkers; as well as in England, John "Walking" Stewart, whose insistence that all matter is endowed with a moral dimension had a major impact on the philosophical poetry of William Wordsworth.

Matija Antun Relković

Relković's prison years became his Lehrjahre, his educational period: a voracious but unsystematic reader, he studied many works by leading Enlightenment writers (Voltaire, Bayle, Diderot), as well as Polish poet Jan Kochanowski's didactic epic Satir- which became the model for his most famous work.

Paris Carnival

Sixty-two years later, in 1752, the Encyclopedia of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert confirmed this impression with almost the same words Furetière used.

Pope Clement XIII

Clement XIII placed the Encyclopédie of D'Alembert and Diderot on the Index, but this index was not as effective as it had been in the previous century.

Richard Yarborough

In Lire en Amérique. Paris, France: Institut d'Etudes Anglophones, Université Paris VII-Denis Diderot, 1993: 33-46.

Supplément au voyage de Bougainville

("Addendum to the Journey of Bougainville, or dialogue between A and B on the drawback to binding moral ideas to certain physical actions which bear none") is a set of philosophical dialogues written by Denis Diderot, inspired by Louis Antoine de Bougainville's Voyage autour du monde.

Tartaras

He was a geometer, mathematician, member of the French Academy of Sciences (elected in 1768), corresponding member of the Academy of Berlin and Adademy of Bologna, honorary member of the Academy of St. Petersburg (1778), a collaborator with Denis Diderot for the mathematical part of the Encyclopedia, the father of the experimental hydrodynamics.


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