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Denis Diderot (Langres, 1713 - Paris, 1784) was a philosopher, mathematician, poet, novelist and art critic. He was educated at the Jesuit college of Langres and became a professor at age 19, in 1732. In Paris, he studied law at the Sorbonne.
Advisor to the Russian tsars in 1773. He was elected member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was a decisive figure of the Enlightenment. He was not a member of the French Academy as some sources cite.
Recognized for his intellectual drive and his erudition and critical spirit, Diderot laid the foundations of bourgeois drama in the theater, revolutionized the novel with Jacques le fataliste or The Nun and the dialogue with The Comedian's Paradox and his Philosophical Thoughts. The fight for freedom.
Director of the Encyclopedia or reasoned dictionary of sciences, arts and crafts, with 72,000 articles, of which 6,000 were by Diderot.
Progressive in its content, the Encyclopedia was combative in its tone: the propaganda of new ideas was completed with criticism of routine criteria, prejudices and beliefs.
"Destinies are in our hands and we can act effectively against them if we rely solely on reason. We must act on nature with the compass of mathematics and the torch of experience."
The French Enlightenment illuminated social and scientific reality. Scientists and artisans combined reason, technique and scientific experimentation to solve the daily problems of citizens. There is exaltation of new values such as nature, freedom, equality and fraternity.
The child is perceived as a being in growth and somatic and psychic maturation as well as subject (etymologically, who remains unaltered to changes) of education and learning needing early intervention.
Socially there is an evolution in the values of charity and compassion that are complemented by beneficence, which is the secular version of Christian charity to which social interest is added. The State wants to take up the cause of the poor and the most needy.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens in 1789 is, together with the Decrees on the Suppression of Feudal Rights of the same year, one of the fundamental texts voted by the National Constituent Assembly, formed by the meeting of the states general, during the French Revolution.
Inspired by the philosophical spirit of the 17th century and the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, it marked the end of the Ancien Regime. King Louis XVI approved it under pressure from the people and the Assembly, and its text served as the basis for the first constitution after the revolution drafted in 1791.
The declaration defines "natural and essential rights such as resistance to oppression, security, liberty and property."
The equality of all citizens before the law and justice was also recognized and the principle of separation of property was affirmed.
"In Egypt they called libraries 'the treasury of the soul's remedies'. In fact, ignorance, the most dangerous of diseases and the origin of all the others, was cured in them" (Jacques Benigne Bossuet)
Diderot was director of the Encyclopedia or Reasoned Dictionary of Sciences, Arts and Crafts in 27 volumes. Five more volumes and two of analytical tables followed. Of the 72,000 articles, 6,000 were contributed by him.
The idea of publishing an encyclopedia in French arose from the influence and publishing success of Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopedia or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728).
In 1745, the publisher le Breton obtained a license for the French translation and commissioned Diderot and Jean de Rond D’Alambert to produce the encyclopedia or reasoned dictionary of the sciences, arts and trades.
The objective was to create a collective work that contained all the knowledge of the time, with the implicit goal of reconstructing society and disseminating knowledge. They promoted better education for the people. For them, the force that would change the world is education.
Diderot defines the Encyclopedia like this:
"Indeed, the purpose of an Encyclopedia is to bring together scattered knowledge, to show the general system to the men with whom we live, and to transmit it to the men who will come after us; so that the works of past centuries will not be "useless works for the following centuries; that our grandchildren, being more educated, are at the same time more virtuous and happier, and that we do not disappear without having contributed to the human race."
He did not get rich from his books, proof of this is that he had to sell his library to be able to offer a dowry to his daughter Angelique. It was Catherine II of Russia who ordered the purchase of the library when she learned of Diderot's financial hardships.
For some time he was credited with authoring the book The Code of Nature, which was later attributed to Morelly. This work appears around the middle of the 18th century and deserves to be cited first in the origins of social thought. Morelly is convinced that the abolition of the right to property is the essential and only condition of human happiness.
Diderot defended the natural state of man in his work Supplement to the Voyage of Bouganville (1772). It describes a fantastic island where men have found happiness by abandoning themselves to the simplicity of primary instincts.
The work was a commentary on the book by Louis Antoine de Bouganville, who had repeated the feat of Magellan and Elcano from 1766 to 1769, exploiting Tuamotú and Tahiti, which he named New Cythera (in memory of the Aegean island consecrated to love The painter Watteau made a painting titled Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera). Also Samoa and New Hebrides, Solomon, New Guinea, the Moluccas and Java. In his work he contributed to reinforcing the belief that in distant lands man in a state of nature was good and brave.
