Word: diderot
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Once, the two philosophers were names that made news. "Ye gods!" a nobleman of Paris exclaimed. "Everywhere I go, I hear talk of nobody but this Rousseau and this Diderot . . . People of the lowest sort, people who do not even own their own houses, who live on the fourth floor . . ." Today, except for a few scholars, people talk a good deal less about Diderot than they do of Rousseau. Students who learn of Diderot in college are apt to classify him as one of the great French Encyclopedists, learn too little of his novels, plays and essays. If they remembered...
...responsible for the new interest in Diderot had been a fan for most of his life. But even to German-born Herbert Dieckmann, now a professor of Romance languages at St. Louis' Washington University, Diderot the man was still a "fantastic and unbelievable enigma." For one thing, most of his original manuscripts had disappeared...
...Fishy Sound. Dieckmann had a hunch that Diderot had never really destroyed the manuscript of his great philosophical dialogue, D'Alembert's Dream, though one contemporary declared that Diderot had burned it and another said he had torn it up. "The whole thing sounded fishy to me," says Dieckmann...
...room for his ilbrary, "from which I formed an indifferent opinion of his taste and judgment." In France, Rush saw Louis XV, who "had a good eye, and an intelligent countenance, and hence he was said to be "the most sensible looking fool in Europe.' " The great Encyclopedist, Diderot, entertained Rush in his library, and the Marquis of Mirabeau invited him to a "coterie" at his home...
...dawn, worked 15 hours a day. She was no voluptuous debauchee: "her love-life resembled that of an important business man; it was simple, very sentimental, and rather pathetic." Catherine found her liberal-philosophizing theories sharply modified by the experience of ruling Russia. When Philosopher Diderot reproached her for her change of heart, she replied: "You philosophers are fortunate people. You write on patient paper-I, poor empress, am forced to write upon the ticklish skin of human beings." Darkest blot on her scutcheon was the murder of Ivan, the real heir to the throne, who had been kept...