X-Nico

unusual facts about Diderot



Ceci n'est pas un conte

In the image of the painting The Treachery of Images by René Magritte, Diderot wants to tell us that a person's behavior is not in itself moral or immoral.

David Riazanov

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

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.

Élisabeth Badinter

Thomas, Diderot, Madame d'Épinay : Qu'est-ce qu'une femme ?, foreword by Élisabeth Badinter, 1989

Ippolit Bogdanovich

In 1788, Bogdanovich was appointed Director of State Archives, a post which he treated as a sinecure, translating Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau at loose hours.

Jaucourt

Louis de Jaucourt, French physicist and writer, a major contributor to Diderot's Encyclopédie

Josip Vilfan

He was also highly influenced by the social theories of Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu, Lessing, Diderot, as well as by the Scottish enlightenment, Latin classics (mostly Cicero and Seneca), and the constitutional thought of the American founding fathers.

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.

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.

Mélanie de Salignac

Mélanie de Salignac (Marennes, Charente-Maritime, 19 January 1744 –1766) was a young French woman whose achievements in the face of her disability - blindness - were mentioned in the accounts of Diderot.

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.

Rameau's Nephew

Society does not allow the talented to support themselves because it does not value them, leaving them to beg while the rich, the powerful and stupid poke fun at men like Buffon, Duclos, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Diderot.

Suzanne Curchod

Among the regular visitors were Marmontel, La Harpe, Buffon, Grimm, Mably, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and the compilers of the Encyclopédie including Diderot and d'Alembert.


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