Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freel..., Andrew S. Curran
Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freel..., Andrew S. Curran
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Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely

Author: Andrew S. Curran

Narrator: Paul Boehmer

Unabridged: 13 hr 18 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 07/24/2019


Synopsis

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 In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial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.

About Andrew S. Curran

Andrew S. Curran is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities and Professor of French at Wesleyan University. He was also Dean of Arts and Humanities at the university from 2009 to 2013. He is the author of several books, including Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment, and Sublime Disorder, Physical Monstrosity in Diderot's Universe. Curran lives in Connecticut with his wife, Jen. They have two children.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Ryan on January 24, 2019

Denis Diderot, the French philosopher, art critic, and writer, was described by Voltaire as a pantophile, or the type of person who falls in love with everything they study, from mathematics, science, and medicine to philosophy, politics, literature, and art. So while Diderot never produced a master......more

Goodreads review by Marks54 on August 12, 2019

I am mixed over this one. At one level, Diderot was a challenging thinker who was not bound by the preconceptions of his day. His work on the Encyclopedia changed the way intelligent readers read and then organized their intellectual worlds. Curran’s bio does a good job at linking Diderot’s life wit......more

Goodreads review by Sketchbook on July 22, 2019

Denis Diderot (1713-1784) had a valued friend in Catherine the Great. But when she initially invited him and one of his Encyclopedie editors to Russia, the editor declined, and teasingly told Diderot that he was "prone to hemmorrhoids and they are far too dangerous in that country." Her husband, Emp......more

Goodreads review by James on April 25, 2019

An inviting, even sprightly, biography of the Enlightenment era philosophe and man of letters whose energy supplied the impetus for the great Encyclopédie, and whose originality of thought and expression made him a more pervasive influence on modern thought than any single work of his implies. The a......more

Goodreads review by Filipa on May 05, 2020

It's not every 500 pages biography that keeps my eye on every single page. Huge work on writing about such a complex and paradoxal character such as Diderot.......more