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Nous voudrions mettre en question une vision réductrice des encyclopédistes : contrairement à une représentation convenue émanant d ’ une lecture biaisée de l ’Encyclopédie due à la lunette déformante des positivistes et des scientistes du XIX e siècle, les encyclopédistes sont loin d ’ être des chantres du progrès mais développent plutôt, notamment dans le Discours préliminaire de l'Encyclopédie et les articles épistémologiques et scientifiques, une conception sceptique de l ’ esprit humain et de sa capacité à connaître l (...) ’ Univers. Ajoutons que cette lecture biaisée a été reprise haut et fort au XX e siècle par l ’ École de Francfort qui n ’ a pas hésité à forcer le trait du prétendu optimisme rationaliste des philosophes des Lumières jusqu ’ à en faire les initiateurs des formes contemporaines de totalitarisme. C ’ est contre cette lecture que le présent article s ’ inscrit. (shrink)

En esta nota crítica (i) se hace una breve descripción de cada uno de los artículos que componen Orayen: de la forma lógica al significado, (ii) se señalan algunas cuestiones que no están claras en ellos o en las réplicas de Orayen y, (iii) en la medida de lo posible, se indica si los autores desarrollan ulteriormente los problemas abordados en sus artículos. The aim of this critical note is threefold: (i) it briefly describes and comments on each of the (...) articles of Orayen: de la forma lógica al significado; (ii) identifies some issues that may not be clear enough or not fully developed whether in the articles or even in Orayen's replies; (iii) as far as possible, it refers to further studies made by the authors themselves on the same, or quite related, subjects addressed by them in their papers. (shrink)

En contrepoint à son œuvre mathématique et physique — et en relation avec elle — d'Alembert a développé une théorie de la connaissance influencée par Locke et le sensualisme de Condillac, mais centrée avant tout sur une épistémologie de la physique newtonienne. Réaliste, prônant le recours à l'expérience, il est en même temps profondément rationaliste, et même précisément, quoiqu'il s'en défende plutôt, dans la lignée de Descartes, Mais, bien que la Raison soit sa référence fondamentale, à tel point qu'il (...) voudrait fonder sur ses principes les plus évidents toute la science physico-mathématique — c'est-à-dire par excellence la Mécanique —, son programme ne peut être dit cartésien : non seulement il rejette les idées innées, mais il accepte la critique d'une rationalité apparente requise par la considération de faits irréductibles (l'attraction par exemple). Son épistémologie est un réalisme rationnel référé à l'être même de la Nature (la Raison et la Nature se rejoignent en profondeur). C'est en fonction de ces conceptions qu'il accepte ou rejette certaines notions physiques soit ambiguës, soit incertaines. Son rejet du concept de force comme celui de la considération d'une texture intime des corps semblent en faire, par le refus de ce qui ne serait pas directement mesurable, l'annonciateur du positivisme de Laplace et de Comte : une telle interprétation serait inexacte, et d'Alembert considère que la pensée peut parvenir à la connaissance du réel. Si ses conceptions s'élaborent en contrepoint de son activité scientifique, c'est en même temps en lutte et polémique contre la métaphysique, au sein de son engagement philosophique — il est tête de file, avec Voltaire, du « parti philosophique » — et notamment dans l'Encyclopédie. Bien qu'il se réfère, comme Newton, à une Intelligence suprême à l'œuvre dans l'Univers, il n'est pas déiste et affiche bientôt une position sceptique. Sa recherche et son affirmation de l'autonomie des lois de la Nature sont a-thées au sens privatif qui annonce Laplace. Il s'oppose au matérialisme de d'Holbach ou Helvétius, mais il se rapproche peu à peu — et notamment vers 1765, sans doute sous l'influence de Diderot qui rédigea vers cette époque Le rêve de d'Alembert et avec qui il venait de renouer — d'un matérialisme dynamique : mais, ce matérialisme, il ne le professe qu'en privé (essentiellement dans sa correspondance avec Frédéric de Prusse). L'âme est matérielle, et si « le plus simple raisonnement prouve qu'il y a un être éternel » , ce Dieu est matériel, il « n'est que la matière en tant qu'intelligente » , ce qui rejoint la définition du matérialisme donnée par Diderot dans l'Encyclopédie. Toutefois, refusant de se prononcer sur l'en-soi des choses, et sur la nature de la matière elle-même, comme de se définir métaphysiquement, son matérialisme tardif est encore marqué de scepticisme. (shrink)

Je n'examinerai, au cours de cet article, que I'un des aspects du matérialisme de Diderot: la physionomie du théoricien de la nature, de l'auteur de I' Interprétation de la Nature, du Rêve de d'Alembert. Ces oeuvres versent au dossier du développement de la philosophie des sciences de la nature, une doctrine, le materialisme; une methodologie; un programme de recherche. Mais sur ce sujet on ne peut guere separer la réflexion de Diderot de celle de son ami d'Holbach, (...) réflexion qui lui est complementaire. D'Holbach rencontre les thèses de Diderot et surtout les systématisent. L'enjeu principal de cette systématisation est la diffusion des idées et du programme du « parti des philosophes ». Il s'agit de mettre à la disposition du combat encyclopediste le nouveau Discours de la méthode des sciences expérimentales, sous forme manipulable d'un code, le Code de la Nature. « Système de la Nature », l'expression empruntee au titre de l'ouvrage célèbre du baron, paru en 1779, manifeste cette intention polémique/politique. D'Holbach nomme ainsi son ouvrage, même si à cette époque on entend par opposition au mathematisme cartésien, s'entenir, contre tout système, à l'expérience, à la leçon des faits. (shrink)

Quelle est la place du scepticisme dans l'œuvre d'un philosophe des Lumières comme Denis Diderot? Cet ouvrage vise à mettre en évidence les caractéristiques de la réception des instances sceptiques dans les œuvres de Diderot. L'analyse prend en considération l'ensemble du corpus diderotien, y compris sa contribution à l'Encyclopédie. L'objectif est aussi de montrer que la méthode sceptique de Diderot, qui consiste en l'usage de certaines argumentations, mais aussi en un ensemble de choix stylistiques, permet de mieux (...) interpréter certaines spécificités de sa pensée philosophique et de son matérialisme. Une meilleure compréhension du rôle du scepticisme dans la pensée de Diderot vise à apporter une contribution aux études sur ce qu'on définit comme le scepticisme des Lumières, en montrant qu'il serait plus exact de parler de scepticismes au pluriel, en raison des différences qui subsistent parmi les philosophes. Pour cette raison, ce livre propose des confrontations entre Diderot et ses sources sceptiques, mais aussi avec d'autres philosophes de son époque comme Montesquieu, Voltaire, D'Alembert et Hume"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The concept of self has preeminently been asserted (in its many versions) as a core component of anti-reductionist, antinaturalistic philosophical positions, from Descartes to Husserl and beyond, with the exception of some hybrid or intermediate positions which declare rather glibly that, since we are biological entities which fully belong to the natural world, and we are conscious of ourselves as 'selves', therefore the self belongs to the natural world (this is characteristic e.g. of embodied phenomenology and enactivism). Nevertheless, from Cudworth (...) and More’s attacks on materialism all the way through twentieth-century argument against naturalism, the gulf between selfhood and the world of Nature appears unbridgeable. In contrast, my goal in this paper is to show that early modern materialism could yield a theory of the self according to which (1) the self belongs to the world of external relations (Spinoza), such that no one fact, including supposedly private facts, is only accessible to a single person; (2) the self can be reconstructed as a sense of “organic unity” which could be a condition for biological individuality (a central text here is Diderot’s 1769 Rêve de D’Alembert); yet this should not lead us to espouse a Romantic concept of organism as foundational or even ineffable subjectivity (a dimension present in Leibniz and made explicit in German idealism); (3) what we call 'self' might simply be a dynamic process of interpretive activity undertaken by the brain. This materialist theory of the self should not neglect the nature of experience, but it should also not have to take at face value the recurring invocations of a better, deeper “first-person perspective” or “first-person science.”. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ : Cet article s’attache à un aspect fondamental de la philosophie matérialiste de Diderot, à savoir le fait que l’individualité psychologique ne peut pas correspondre à l’individu matériel que nous sommes parce que la mémoire sur laquelle elle repose est toujours en quelque sorte partielle. Que faire alors si cet individu matériel lui-même voit son existence mise en doute, du fait que, comme l’annonce le Rêve de d’Alembert, le seul individu, c’est le «tout»? En mettant en relation ces (...) deux démarches, nous montrons comment on peut élaborer une théorie de l’individu qui tienne compte du décalage entre l’individuation comme processus physique et de la constitution de l’individualité comme processus psychologique. -/- ABSTRACT: This paper is devoted to a fundamental aspect of Diderot’s materialist hilosophy: the fact that psychological identity does not exactly correspond with the material individuals we are because the memories on which psychological identity relies are always partial. This is complicated by the fact that even the material individual is denied reality since, as is stated in the Rêve de d’Alembert , the only individual is the «whole». By relating these two approaches, I try to show how one can develop a theory of the individual that takes into account the gap between individuation as a physical process and the constitution of a psychological individual. (shrink)

Denis Diderot’s natural philosophy is deeply and centrally ‘biologistic’: as it emerges between the 1740s and 1780s, thus right before the appearance of the term ‘biology’ as a way of designating a unified science of life (McLaughlin), his project is motivated by the desire both to understand the laws governing organic beings and to emphasize, more ‘philosophically’, the uniqueness of organic beings within the physical world as a whole. This is apparent both in the metaphysics of vital matter he (...) puts forth in works such as D’Alembert’s Dream (1769) and the more empirical concern with the mechanics of life in his manuscript Elements of Physiology, on which he worked during the last twenty years of his life. This ‘biologism’ obviously presents the interpreter of Diderot with some difficulties, notably as regards his materialism, given that contemporary forms of materialism have on the contrary strongly rejected notions of emergence, vitalism, teleology and any concepts appealing to unique, irreducible features of organisms. In response, some have described him as a ‘holist’ (Kaitaro) while others have emphasized his materialist, naturalist project (Bourdin, Wolfe). In what follows I examine a little-known aspect of Diderot’s articulation of his biological project: his statement in favour of epigenesis within the short but suggestive Encyclopédie article “Spinosiste.” Diderot was, of course, a partisan of epigenesis (the developmental-biological theory opposed to preformation, according to which beings develop by successive adjunction of layers of matter), but why include a statement in favour of a particular biological (or developmental) theory within an entry dealing with a philosopher, Spinoza, who does not seem to have been concerned at all with the specific properties of living beings, how they grow from embryonic to developed states, and so on? By trying to answer this question I also try and locate Diderot’s biological project in relation to what will become, in the years after his death, the project for a science called ‘biology’, with figures such as Treviranus and Lamarck. For it is not clear that the two can be easily correlated or causally linked: Diderot’s ‘epigenetic Spinozism’ is a different conceptual entity from what we find in histories of biology. (shrink)

En s'appuyant sur la médecine, la chimie et la biologie, Diderot nous offre une conception du monde, différente de celle des déistes et des métaphysiciens, dont les mots-clés sont l'éphémérité, le hasard, le mouvement et la monstruosité. Cette vision de l'univers, résolument moniste et hylozoïste, que renferme principalement Le Rêve de d'Alembert, repose sur deux conditions de possibilité : une théorie de la connaissance exposée dans la Lettre sur les aveugles et une méthodologie expérimentale fournie par les Pensées (...) sur l'interprétation de la nature. D'où il s'ensuit que les trois oeuvres mentionnées ci-devant sont liées les unes aux autres et constituent, de ce fait, un véritable triptyque philosophique"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Diderot, Denis: El sobrino de Rameau. El mundo sin Dios y el hombre en la naturaleza; conversación entre d'Alembert y Diderot. Sueño de d'Alembert (fragmentos) -- Holbach, Baron von. Sistema de la naturaleza. -- Helvetius, C. A. Del espíritu.

Intellectual history still quite commonly distinguishes between the episode we know as the Scientific Revolution, and its successor era, the Enlightenment, in terms of the calculatory and quantifying zeal of the former—the age of mechanics—and the rather scientifically lackadaisical mood of the latter, more concerned with freedom, public space and aesthetics. It is possible to challenge this distinction in a variety of ways, but the approach I examine here, in which the focus on an emerging scientific field or cluster of (...) disciplines—the ‘life sciences’, particularly natural history, medicine, and physiology —is, not Romantically anti-scientific, but resolutely anti-mathematical. Diderot bluntly states, in his Thoughts on the interpretation of nature, that “We are on the verge of a great revolution in the sciences. Given the taste people seem to have for morals, belles-lettres, the history of nature and experimental physics, I dare say that before a hundred years, there will not be more than three great geometricians remaining in Europe. The science will stop short where the Bernoullis, the Eulers, the Maupertuis, the Clairauts, the Fontaines and the D’Alemberts will have left it.... We will not go beyond.” Similarly, Buffon in the first discourse of his Histoire naturelle speaks of the “over-reliance on mathematical sciences,” given that mathematical truths are merely “definitional” and “demonstrative,” and thereby “abstract, intellectual and arbitrary.” Earlier in the Thoughts, Diderot judges “the thing of the mathematician” to have “as little existence in nature as that of the gambler.” Significantly, this attitude—taken by great scientists who also translated Newton or wrote careful papers on probability theory, as well as by others such as Mandeville—participates in the effort to conceptualize what we might call a new ontology for the emerging life sciences, very different from both the ‘iatromechanism’ and the ‘animism’ of earlier generations, which either failed to account for specifically living, goal-directed features of organisms, or accounted for them in supernaturalistic terms by appealing to an ‘anima’ as explanatory principle. Anti-mathematicism here is then a key component of a naturalistic, open-ended project to give a successful reductionist model of explanation in ‘natural history’, a model which is no more vitalist than it is materialist—but which is fairly far removed from early modern mechanism. (shrink)

Este artigo pretende estudar quatro princípios do movimento da matéria (força viva, força morta, força íntima da molécula e força vital) que aparecem no Sonho de d’Alembert (1769), nos Princípios filosóficos sobre a matéria e o movimento (1770) e nos Elementos de fisiologia (1782) de Diderot. Com tal estudo, gostaríamos de mostrar a possibilidade daquilo que chamamos de sensação inerte e de sensação ativa, com base num quinto princípio: a força neural. Nossa hipótese é que o raciocínio que fundamenta (...) a teoria de Diderot sobre a sensibilidade universal da matéria desemboca nas ideias de sensação inerte e de sensação ativa. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Diderot philosopheTimo KaitaroColas Duflo. Diderot philosophe. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003. Pp. 543. Cloth, € 85,00.Diderot's thought has often been believed to be full of incoherencies and paradoxes, lacking the unity characteristic of philosophical systems. It is true that he preferred the form of a dialogue to that of a systematic treatise and that his ideas on a specific subject tend to be dispersed in a (...) variety of philosophical, literary or epistolary texts. However, the different pieces fit together nicely, if one has the patience to put them together. In his new monograph Colas Duflo manages to show the coherence and unity of Diderot's philosophy, not only by showing the consistency of the philosopher's thought on epistemological, aesthetical and moral subjects separately, but also by showing the close interdependence of different aspects of his philosophical inquiry and their grounding in his biological materialism.Before the author examines Diderot's philosophy proper, he introduces the reader to Diderot's manner of writing and shows how the literary forms in which the encyclopedist presented his philosophy are indistinguishable from its content. Diderot did not write dialogues just in order to present in a palatable and entertaining form a philosophy that could well have been presented in erudite treatises. Dialogue was the original form of Diderot's thought. It helped him to distance himself from his thoughts and to put his ideas in a dialogue with each other, instead of systematizing them. In his dialogues the truth is approached by multiplying perspectives instead of being viewed from a central perspective which unifies the various points of view in one vision. Reminding the reader of this aspect of Diderot's philosophy is important. One would look in vain for the traditional mouthpiece of the truth among the protagonists of his dialogues; and this is true even in cases when he stages himself among them.Colas Duflo starts his discussion of Diderot's philosophy by examining the philosopher's complex and changing relation to metaphysical finalism in his first philosophical works. Duflo also lets this theme of finalism run through the book as the main thread, which provides a coherent framework for the treatement of the different aspects of Diderot's philosophy. The presentation of Diderot's early writings situates these works in their contemporary context and manages to reveal the internal logic of Diderot's development from a finalist deist to an antifinalist atheist in a convincing manner. The chapter dealing with Le rêve de d'Alembert provides a careful and well-thought-out reading of this work and shows the originality of Diderot's biological materialism, which has really nothing to do with the mechanism sometimes falsely attributed to him (and to La Mettrie). Diderot's thought was not so much rooted in the mechanical world-view as it was in the sciences of life of his time. In relation to the problem of unity vs. multiplicity in Diderot's organicistic materialism, Duflo tends to emphasize multiplicity. One could, in fact, with as much reason, argue the opposite and put the emphasis on unity. But this is perhaps a matter of taste, since Diderot's originality lies in fact in his ability to take into account both aspects of the organisms by describing the continuing tensions between unifying and disrupting forces at work within them.The part of the book dealing with aesthetics places the encyclopedist's theory of taste in the context of his materialism. The interpretations proposed are convincing although one has to take account of the fact that Duflo uses the word "spontaneous," not in its usual sense referring to immediate and unreflected reactions, but rather as a synonym of innate [End Page 498] (see 303). Diderot emphasized the former but denied the latter. The juxtaposition of Diderot's aesthetics with that of Kant provides some enlightening insights into both. From taste one passes fluently to Diderot's moral philosophy: according to Diderot moral judgements resemble those of taste in so far as they are often as spontaneous as the latter. And despite this they are not innate but based on experience.The chapters dealing with the moral and political philosophy of... (shrink)

Intellectual history still quite commonly distinguishes between the episode we know as the Scientific Revolution, and its successor era, the Enlightenment, in terms of the calculatory and quantifying zeal of the former—the age of mechanics—and the rather scientifically lackadaisical mood of the latter, more concerned with freedom, public space and aesthetics. It is possible to challenge this distinction in a variety of ways, but the approach I examine here, in which the focus on an emerging scientific field or cluster of (...) disciplines—the ‘life sciences’, particularly natural history, medicine, and physiology —is, not Romantically anti-scientific, but resolutely anti-mathematical. Diderot bluntly states, in his Thoughts on the interpretation of nature, that “We are on the verge of a great revolution in the sciences. Given the taste people seem to have for morals, belles-lettres, the history of nature and experimental physics, I dare say that before a hundred years, there will not be more than three great geometricians remaining in Europe. The science will stop short where the Bernoullis, the Eulers, the Maupertuis, the Clairauts, the Fontaines and the D’Alemberts will have left it.... We will not go beyond.” Similarly, Buffon in the first discourse of his Histoire naturelle speaks of the “over-reliance on mathematical sciences,” given that mathematical truths are merely “definitional” and “demonstrative,” and thereby “abstract, intellectual and arbitrary.” Earlier in the Thoughts, Diderot judges “the thing of the mathematician” to have “as little existence in nature as that of the gambler.” Significantly, this attitude—taken by great scientists who also translated Newton or wrote careful papers on probability theory, as well as by others such as Mandeville—participates in the effort to conceptualize what we might call a new ontology for the emerging life sciences, very different from both the ‘iatromechanism’ and the ‘animism’ of earlier generations, which either failed to account for specifically living, goal-directed features of organisms, or accounted for them in supernaturalistic terms by appealing to an ‘anima’ as explanatory principle. Anti-mathematicism here is then a key component of a naturalistic, open-ended project to give a successful reductionist model of explanation in ‘natural history’, a model which is no more vitalist than it is materialist—but which is fairly far removed from early modern mechanism. (shrink)

Le but de cet ouvrage est de montrer la teneur philosophique unitaire de la pensée critique de Diderot par delà le caractère éclaté et dispersé de son œuvre. Diderot philosophe est présenté comme un penseur critique et systématique, c'est-à-dire un philosophe dont la réflexion, d'une part, s'inscrit dans le cadre du courant de pensée moderne qui vise à dépasser les perspectives du « premier regard géomètre de la raison », celui de Descartes, de Malebranche et des post-cartésiens. D'autre (...) part, elle atteint un « second regard critique », plus profond, jeté sur le monde de la nature et surtout, sur lui-même (une philosophie de l'aperception : Spinoza, Wolff, les Moralistes anglais et Kant), qui se rattache intimement à un matérialisme biologique tout à fait original, issu de la confrontation de Diderot avec les naturalistes et les médecins de son temps. C'est ce matérialisme élaboré dans l'usine encyclopédique qui met en cause la notion clé d'« individualité naturelle » (jouée en couplet avec une « communauté du désir ») - néologisme dont Le Neveu de Rameau et Le Rêve de D'Alembert développeront les tenants et les aboutissants philosophiques -, et qui témoigne de la nouveauté d'approche propre à cette philosophie, à l'intérieur de la pensée des Lumières européennes. Avec Diderot, c'est une nouvelle figure historique de la philosophie elle-même - celle de la subjectivité individuelle complexe, uni-totalité de penser-sentir-agir - qui monte sur la scène de la modernité, comme étant la substance première, incontournable et insaisissable, de la pensée critique de nos jours. (shrink)

This volume of selections provides a fresh translation of some of the major philosophical and literary achievements of the beleaguered editor of the Encyclopedie. For the most part, the selections follow a chronological sequence with each selection given a brief explanation in which the reader is referred to the 1875 Assezat and Tourneux edition of Diderot's works. The main thrust of Diderot's philosophical materialism is embodied in D'Alembert's Dream, in which the author argues that the mechanized-physical view (...) gives coherent unity to cosmological, biological, and moral speculation. Yet, if Diderot is to be a materialist, he is to be a humanistic one, for in his Refutation of Helvetius he rails against the latter's view of man as a mere sensory-bound animal devoid of real moral feelings. Thus there is in Diderot a vacillation between a heartfelt desire for moral values which beg to be grounded on reason, and a reason that cannot accept the basis for the values of his day since experience seems to contradict such a basis. Diderot expresses this dichotomy well in Rameau's Nephew. In the mastery of his dialogue form, Diderot plays the man of moral stability while the nephew represents the moral nihilist. It is interesting to note that Hegel saw in the nephew a cultural alienation or self-estrangement which gradually produced the characteristic cleavage between faith and reason in the age of the French Enlightenment. Since he bore this inner tension within himself, and since it is men who make up "ages," one can say that Diderot was the French Enlightenment.—J. J. R. (shrink)

The natural philosophy of Diderot is built from the experience of the fundamental Description des Arts in the Encyclopedia, or from the «great and beautiful collection of machines» which the work provides a very rich representation. Models and metaphors that Diderot constructs to describe the world of organic beings, from the Pensées sur l'Interpretation de la nature , are inspired by the world of the mechanical arts and crafts. The manouvriers d’expériences, the experimental philosophers, are the great inventors (...) and discoverers of the secrets of nature and living being: to them Diderot inspire itself and his work as a philosopher of nature and arts. From the loom to weave socks, to the fire pump, the description of the machine proceeds through a complex network of metaphors that combine the operation of the instrument to that of organic life. The machine energises itself and the organism, in turn, is mechanized in a maze of functional architectures, according to new models and artistic metaphors of living beings, other than cartesian one. Diderot does not cease to be mechanistic still in his last vitalistic works, from Le Rêve de D’Alembert, to the Éléments de Physiologie. The new world of handicraft and artisans remains the key reference point in the philosophical work of the encyclopaedist-naturalist: weaving loom socks and sensible harpsichord are the two tools / metaphors that describe the man and his rational and specific nature. (shrink)

This article attempts to tie two questions together: how to approach the process that constitutes multitudes into communities? And: what role can literary studies play in the age of Empire? To overcome the abstraction of these questions, the article closely follows the return of the word « consequence » in Diderot’s text, D’Alembert’s Dream. Through the wealth of echoes provided by a few quotes, the literary approach comes to be defined as a coring to light of the programs which (...) engineer the reproduction of our social life. Depending on its effects , the encounter between a text and a brain can play a significant regulating role in the permanent process of constitution of multitudes into communities. The disarray in which literary critics and teachers alike find themselves today should lead to a redefinition of their activity which would put the multitudes in position to be the producers, rather than the receivers, of tomorrow ’s literarity. (shrink)

The lesson of atoms. Lucretius' influence in Diderot. Diderot appreciated Lucretius' poem, which was for him an early introduction to the philosophy of the ancient atomists. He probably intended the Ręve de d'Alembert, which posits the most daring hypotheses of his own philosophy of nature, to be a modern De rerum natura. However, the influence of Lucretius on the Encyclopedist appears to be complex. If Diderot clearly contradicts certain atomist theses, notably as they concern the origin (...) of living beings, this is doubtless due to his fidelity to a profound Epicurean principle - that of the complete autonomy of natural forces - which, in his opinion, needs to be defended on new grounds. Beyond its literal statements, one can thus follow in the Ręve the principal intelligible frameworks characteristic of the De rerum natura, as well as a poetic mode of writing inspired by Lucretius and intended to arouse the speculative imagination. Mots-clé: Diderot, Lucrčce, épicurisme, atomisme, matičre, philosophie naturelle, sensibilité, transformisme. (shrink)

This paper wishes to offer a historical derivation of the mature Diderot’s fully materialistic, physiological theory of the soul, and to show the conflict between the theological concept of the soul as a principle of freedom, and the materialistic-deterministic concept of the soul, in his philosophical and literary oeuvre. In historical respect, Diderot formulated his mature position on the basis of Locke’s theory of ‘thinking matter’, of Toland’s idea that ‘action is essential to matter’, of Maupertuis’s theory of (...) ‘spontaneous creative degeneration’. We present and analyze these theories one by one, together with Voltaire’s propaganda of the Lockean conception. Next, d’Alembert’s orthodox philosophy of the soul is examined, as this was Diderot’s immediate target in Le Rêve d’Alembert. The last chapters of the paper describe the afore-mentioned conflict within Diderot’s philosophy of the soul. We reach the conclusion that in Diderot’s theory, soul as a not fully determined substance still seems the ‘differentia’ of man from the rest of the living beings, though he would certainly argue that our freedom is very limited. A philosophical comparison with Kant’s account of human freedom closes the article. (shrink)