Book description
One of the key figures of the French Enlightenment, Denis Diderot was a
passionate critic of conventional morality, society and religion. Among
his greatest and most well-known works, these two dialogues are dazzling
examples of his radical scientific and philosophical beliefs. In
Rameau's Nephew, the eccentric and foolish nephew of the great composer
Jean-Philippe Rameau meets Diderot by chance, and the two embark on a
hilarious consideration of society, music, literature, politics,
morality and philosophy. Its companion-piece, D'Alembert's Dream,
outlines a material, atheistic view of the universe, expressed through
the fevered dreams of Diderot's friend D'Alembert. Unpublished during
his lifetime, both of these powerfully controversial works show Diderot
to be one of the most advanced thinkers of his age, and serve as
fascinating testament to the philosopher's wayward genius.
Denis Diderot was born at Langres in eastern France in 1713. After
graduating in Paris in 1732, he was nominally a law student for ten
years, but was actually leading a precarious bohemian but studious
existence. In the early 1740s he met three contemporaries who were of
great significance to him and to the age: a'Alembert, Condillac and
Rousseau, who assisted Diderot in the compilation of the Encyclopedie,
which he worked on until its completion in 1773. Interested in the
mind-body dichotomy, his work was a bold mixture of science and
philosophy. He died in 1784.
Leonard Tancock was a Fellow of University College, London and
translated numerous texts for the Penguin Classics until his death in 1986.
