Word: diderot
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...fresh and it did. THC: Professor Leo Damrosch, I noticed one of your special fields of interest is the Enlightenment period. If you could go back in time and be any Enlightenment figure, who would you be and why?LD: Oh, I’d be his friend Denis Diderot, who as I just mentioned is the author of ‘Jacques Le Fataliste.’ Rousseau was a really difficult character; his insecurity ran pretty deep. He placed tremendous demands on friends. Diderot was his best friend for over 10 years, and they ended up never speaking...
Everyone knows about this one. The café is a quiet, oft-neglected place to study* or engage in spirited intellectual conversation. Indeed, by day it resembles a veritable coffeehouse--the type you would find in 18th-century Enlightenment Europe, where Diderot and Montaigne would discuss the great ideas over a newspaper and cup of coffee. Yeah right. More like sweaty undergrads crammed together eating all the food. But whatever, it gets the job done. You're probably reading this there...
...French history that remains entirely to be written. Generously funded by Harvard’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, I was endowed not only with the necessary pecunia to keep me in a tiny flat off the Boulevard Diderot, but also with something more immaterial, yet of crucial value: a letter beginning with “To Whom it May Concern.” On fancy Veritas-watermarked paper, this short message was my admittance ticket to a number of locations that the average visitor to Paris is never...
...about his career except the beauty of the works it produced. His field of social vision was narrow. But by painting what he knew, neither more nor less, he became the standard-bearer of visual truth to a generation of French intellectuals, the Encyclopedists, led by the philosopher Denis Diderot. To them, Chardin's refusal of the highfalutin theme seemed exemplary. He showed that a jar of apricots on a table could be just as important and freighted with meaning as a battle scene in an epic of Alexander, the impregnation of a nymph by Apollo, or the reception into...
...dead ray, or skate, the commonest of sights in a Paris fishmarket, knows that the underside of this fish bears a grisly resemblance to the human face. But that sort of double meaning, with its built-in pathos, would probably have struck the artist as a bit cheap. Diderot, despite his great admiration of Chardin, thought the ray disgusting--but there's nothing to suggest that Chardin was repelled by those glistening pearl-pink guts or the lunar luster on the ray's skin, let alone that (like some modern writers) he saw in the hanging ray an analogy...