Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely

Zusatztext 103794064 Informationen zum Autor Andrew S. Curran  is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University. The author of two previous books,  Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s Universe  and  The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment , Curran is a Fellow in the history of medicine at the New York Academy of Medicine and a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques. Klappentext Best Book of the Year - Kirkus Reviews A spirited biography of the prophetic and sympathetic philosopher who helped build the foundations of the modern world. Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world's first comprehensive Encyclopédie into existence. But his most daring writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his best books for posterity-for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of the slave trade, to the norms of human sexuality. One of Diderot's most attentive readers during his lifetime was Catherine the Great, who not only supported him financially, but invited him to St. Petersburg to talk about the possibility of democratizing the Russian empire. In this thematically organized biography, Andrew S. Curran vividly describes Diderot's tormented relationship with Rousseau, his curious correspondence with Voltaire, his passionate affairs, and his often iconoclastic stands on art, theater, morality, politics, and religion. But what this book brings out most brilliantly is how the writer's personal turmoil was an essential part of his genius and his ability to flout taboos, dogma, and convention. Prologue unburying diderot   Sometime during the snowy winter of 1793, under cover of night, a small group of thieves pried open a wooden door leading  into  the  Church of Saint-Roch. Forced entry into the Paris sanctuary was nearly a weekly occurrence during this time of revolution. In the early 1790s, anticlerical vandals had pulled enormous religious paintings  off  the  walls  and  slashed  the canvases. Other trespassers had made off with more portable works of art, including an exquisite statue sculpted by Étienne-Maurice Falconet. On this particular night, however, the intruders came to steal whatever copper, silver, or lead they could ?nd in the crypt located underneath the Chapel of the Virgin. Setting to work in front of the chapel’s altar, the grave robbers used long iron bars to lever aside the mattress-sized marble slab in the center of the ?oor. Though they surely had no idea who was buried in the vault, the most loutish of the group, assuming he could read, would still have recognized the name of the writer Denis Diderot inscribed on one of the caskets. Dead for nine years, the notorious atheist had been the driving force behind the most controversial  book  project  of  the  eighteenth century, the Encyclopédie . This massive dictionary had not only dragged sacrilege and free-thinking out into the open, but triggered a decades-long scandal that involved the Sorbonne, the Paris Parlement, the Jesuits, the Jansenists, the king, and the pope. None of this old history mattered to the burglars. After removing Diderot’s lead cof?n from the vault, the men simply shook his decomposing body onto the church’s marble ?oor. The following day, Denis Diderot’s remains (along with the other desecrated cadavers from the crypt) were presumably gathered up and transferred without ceremony to a mass grave about a mile to the east. Nobody noticed; nobody reported it in the press. Assuming the church’s few remaining parish priests had realized that Diderot had been buried in ...

About the author

Andrew S. Curran is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University. The author of two previous books, Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s Universe and The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment, Curran is a Fellow in the history of medicine at the New York Academy of Medicine and a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques.

Product details

• Authors: Andrew S Curran, Andrew S. Curran
• Publisher: Other press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 13.10.2020
• EAN: 9781635420395
• ISBN: 978-1-63542-039-5
• No. of pages: 528
• Dimensions: 152 mm x 228 mm x 27 mm
• Series: Other Press
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Humanities, art, music > Philosophy; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies