Denis Diderot (French: [d@ni didRo]; 5 October 1713 - 31 July 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent figure during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the Encyclopedie along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert.
Diderot's contribution to literature was vast, even though "his most adventurous writings were not published till after his death. Just one of many, Jacques le fataliste et son maitre (Jacques the Fatalist and his Master), influenced by Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy, examines the question of free will. Diderot is also celebrated for the profound satirical dialogue Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew), which was first published posthumously in a German translation by the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.


== Biography ==
Denis Diderot was born in Langres, Champagne, and began his formal education at a Jesuit college in Langres.

His parents were Didier Diderot (1685-1759) a cutler, maitre coutelier, and his wife Angelique Vigneron (1677-1748). Three of five siblings survived to adulthood, Denise Diderot (1715-97) and their youngest brother Pierre-Didier Diderot (1722-87), and finally their sister Angelique Diderot (1720-49). According to Arthur McCandless Wilson, Denis Diderot greatly admired his sister Denise, sometimes referring to her as "a female Socrates".
In 1732 Denis Diderot earned the Master of Arts degree in philosophy. Then he entered the College d'Harcourt in Paris. He abandoned the idea of entering the clergy and decided instead to study law. His study of law was short-lived however and in 1734 Diderot decided to become a writer. Because of his refusal to enter one of the learned professions, he was disowned by his father, and for the next ten years he lived a bohemian existence.
In 1742 he befriended Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In 1743 he further alienated his father by marrying Antoinette Champion (1710-96), a devout Roman Catholic. The match was considered inappropriate due to Champion's low social status, poor education, fatherless status, and lack of a dowry. She was about three years older than Diderot. The marriage in October 1743 produced one surviving child, a girl. Her name was Angelique, after both Diderot's dead mother and sister. The death of his sister, a nun, from overwork in the convent may have affected Diderot's opinion of religion. She is assumed to have been the inspiration for his novel about a nun, La Religieuse, in which he depicts a woman who is forced to enter a convent where she suffers at the hands of the other nuns in the community.
Diderot had affairs with the writer Madeleine de Puisieux and with Sophie Volland (1716-84). His letters to Sophie Volland contain some of the most vivid of all the insights that we have of the daily life of the philosophic circle of Paris during this time period.
Though his work was broad as well as rigorous, it did not bring Diderot riches. He secured none of the posts that were occasionally given to needy men of letters; he could not even obtain the bare official recognition of merit which was implied by being chosen a member of the Academie francaise. When the time came for him to provide a dowry for his daughter, he saw no alternative than to sell his library. When Empress Catherine II of Russia heard of his financial troubles she commissioned an agent in Paris to buy the library. She then requested that the philosopher retain the books in Paris until she required them, and act as her librarian with a yearly salary. Between October 1773 and March 1774, the sick Diderot spent a few months at the empress's court in Saint Petersburg.
Diderot died of pulmonary thrombosis in Paris on 31 July 1784, and was buried in the city's Eglise Saint-Roch. His heirs sent his vast library to Catherine II, who had it deposited at the National Library of Russia. He has several times been denied burial in the Pantheon with other French notables, but the French government did recently announce the possibility of memorializing him in this fashion, on the 300th anniversary of his birth (October 2013). For the moment, however, this idea seems to have been tabled.


== Early works ==
Diderot's earliest works included a translation of Temple Stanyan's History of Greece (1743); with two colleagues, Francois-Vincent Toussaint and Marc-Antoine Eidous, he produced a translation of Robert James's Medicinal Dictionary (1746-1748); at about the same time he published a free rendering of Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit (1745), providing notes of his own. In 1746 he wrote his first original work: the Pensees philosophiques, and he added to this a short complementary essay on the sufficiency of natural religion. He then composed a volume of bawdy stories Les bijoux indiscrets (1748); in later years he repented this work. In 1747 he wrote the Promenade du sceptique, an allegory pointing first at the extravagances of Catholicism; second, at the vanity of the pleasures of the world which is the rival of the church; and third, at the desperate and unfathomable uncertainty of the philosophy which professes to be so high above both church and world.
Diderot's celebrated Lettre sur les aveugles a l'usage de ceux qui voient ("Letter on the Blind") (1749) introduced him to the world as a daringly original thinker. The subject is a discussion of the interrelation between man's reason and the knowledge acquired through perception (the five senses). The title, "Letter on the Blind For the Use of Those Who See", also evoked some ironic doubt about who exactly were "the blind" under discussion. In the essay, blind English mathematician Nicholas Saunderson argues that, since knowledge derives from the senses, mathematics is the only form of knowledge that both he and a sighted person can agree on. It is suggested that the blind could be taught to read through their sense of touch (a later essay, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, considered the case of a similar deprivation in the deaf and mute). According to Jonathan Israel, what makes the Lettre sur les aveugles so remarkable, however, is its distinct, if undeveloped, presentation of the theory of variation and natural selection.

This powerful essay, for which La Mettrie expressed warm appreciation in 1751, revolves around a remarkable deathbed scene in which a dying blind philosopher, Saunderson, rejects the arguments of a deist clergyman who endeavours to win him round to a belief in a providential God during his last hours. Saunderson's arguments are those of a neo-Spinozist Naturalist and fatalist, using a sophisticated notion of the self-generation and natural evolution of species without Creation or supernatural intervention. The notion of "thinking matter" is upheld and the "argument from design" discarded (following La Mettrie) as hollow and unconvincing. The work appeared anonymously in Paris in June 1749, and was vigorously suppressed by the authorities. Diderot, who had been under police surveillance since 1747, was swiftly identified as the author, had his manuscripts confiscated, and was imprisoned for some months, under a lettre de cachet, on the outskirts of Paris, in the dungeons at Vincennes where he was visited almost daily by Rousseau, at the time his closest and most assiduous ally.

After signing a document of submission and promising never to write anything prejudicial against Catholicism again, resulting in his most controversial works being published only after his death, Diderot was released from the dungeons of the Vincennes fortress three months later. Subsequently, in collaboration with d'Alembert, he embarked on his greatest project, the Encyclopedie, ou dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers.


== Encyclopedie ==

Andre Le Breton, a bookseller and printer, approached Diderot with a project for the publication of a translation of Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences into French, first undertaken by the Englishman John Mills, and followed by the German Gottfried Sellius. Diderot accepted the proposal, and transformed it. He persuaded Le Breton to publish a new work, which would consolidate ideas and knowledge from the Republic of Letters. The publishers found capital for a larger enterprise than they had first planned. Jean le Rond d'Alembert was persuaded to become Diderot's colleague; and permission was procured from the government.
In 1750 an elaborate prospectus announced the project, and in 1751 the first volume was published. This work was unorthodox and advanced for the time. Diderot stated that "An encyclopedia ought to make good the failure to execute such a project hitherto, and should encompass not only the fields already covered by the academies, but each and every branch of human knowledge." Comprehensive knowledge will give "the power to change men's common way of thinking." The work combined scholarship with information on trades. Diderot emphasized the abundance of knowledge within each subject area. Everyone would benefit from these insights.
Diderot's work, however, was mired in controversy from the beginning; the project was suspended by the courts in 1752. Just as the second volume was completed accusations arose, regarding seditious content, concerning the editor's entries on religion and natural law. Diderot was detained and his house was searched for manuscripts for subsequent articles. But the search proved fruitless as no manuscripts could be found. They were hidden in the house of an unlikely confederate-Chretien de Lamoignon Malesherbes, the very official who ordered the search. Although Malesherbes was a staunch absolutist--loyal to the monarchy--he was sympathetic to the literary project. Along with his support, and that of other well-placed influential confederates, the project resumed. Diderot returned to his efforts only to be constantly embroiled in controversy.
These twenty years were to Diderot not merely a time of incessant drudgery, but harassing persecution and desertion of friends. The ecclesiastical party detested the Encyclopedie, in which they saw a rising stronghold for their philosophic enemies. By 1757 they could endure it no longer. The subscribers had grown from 2,000 to 4,000, a measure of the growth of the work in popular influence and power. The Encyclopedie threatened the governing social classes of France (aristocracy) because it took for granted the justice of religious tolerance, freedom of thought, and the value of science and industry. It asserted the doctrine that the main concern of the nation's government ought to be the nation's common people. It was believed that the Encyclopedie was the work of an organized band of conspirators against society, and that the dangerous ideas they held were made truly formidable by their open publication. In 1759, the Encyclopedie was formally suppressed. The decree did not stop the work, which went on, but its difficulties increased by the necessity of being clandestine. Jean le Rond d'Alembert withdrew from the enterprise and other powerful colleagues, including Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune, declined to contribute further to a book which had acquired a bad reputation.
Diderot was left to finish the task as best he could. He wrote several hundred articles, some very slight, but many of them laborious, comprehensive, and long. He damaged his eyesight correcting proofs and editing the manuscripts of less competent contributors. He spent his days at workshops, mastering manufacturing processes, and his nights writing what he had learned during the day. He was incessantly harassed by threats of police raids. The last copies of the first volume were issued in 1765. At the last moment, when his immense work was drawing to an end, he encountered a crowning mortification: he discovered that the bookseller, fearing the government's displeasure, had struck out from the proof sheets, after they had left Diderot's hands, all passages that he considered too dangerous. The monument to which Diderot had given the labor of twenty long and oppressive years was irreparably mutilated and defaced. It was 12 years, in 1772, before the subscribers received the final 28 folio volumes of the Encyclopedie, ou dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers since the first volume had been published.


== Mature works ==

Although the Encyclopedie was Diderot's most monumental product, he was the author of many other works that sowed nearly every intellectual field with new and creative ideas. Diderot's writing ranges from a graceful trifle like the Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre (Regrets for my Old Dressing Gown) up to the heady Le Reve de d'Alembert (D'Alembert's Dream) (composed 1769), a philosophical dialogue in which he plunges into the depths of the controversy as to the ultimate constitution of matter and the meaning of life. Jacques le fataliste (written in 1773, but not published until 1792 in German and 1796 in French) is similar to Tristram Shandy and The Sentimental Journey in its challenge to the conventional novel's structure and content.


=== Le Neveu de Rameau ===
The dialogue Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew) is a "farce-tragedy" reminiscent of the Satires of Horace, a favorite classical author of Diderot's whose lines "Vertumnis, quotquot sunt, natus iniquis" ("A man born when every single Vertumnus was out of sorts") appear as epigraph. According to Nicholas Cronk, Rameau's Nephew is "arguably the greatest work of the French Enlightenment's greatest writer."
Diderot's intention in writing the dialogue--whether as a satire on contemporary manners, a reduction of the theory of self-interest to an absurdity, the application of irony to the ethics of ordinary convention, a mere setting for a discussion about music, or a vigorous dramatic sketch of a parasite and a human original--is disputed. In political terms it explores "the bipolarisation of the social classes under absolute monarchy," and insofar as its protagonist demonstrates how the servant often manipulates the master, Le Neveu de Rameau can be seen to anticipate Hegel's master-slave dialectic. The text has also generated articles and sermons about consumer desire. Whatever its intent, is a remarkable conversation, representing an era that held the art of conversation in the highest regard.

The writing and publication history of the Nephew is likewise a bit mysterious. Diderot never saw the work through to publication during his lifetime, but there is every indication that it was of continual interest to him. Though the original draft was written in 1761, he made additions to it year after year until his death twenty-three years later. Goethe's translation (1805) was the first introduction of Le Neveu de Rameau to the European public. After executing it, he gave back the original French manuscript to Friedrich Schiller, from whom he had it. No authentic French copy of it appeared until the writer had been dead for forty years (1823).


== Visual Arts ==
Art played a major role in Diderot's life and thought.
Diderot's most intimate friend was the philologist Friedrich Melchior Grimm. They were brought together by their friend in common at that time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Grimm wrote newsletters to various high personages in Germany, reporting the happenings of art and literature in Paris, then the intellectual capital of Europe. Diderot helped Grimm between 1759 and 1779 by writing an account of the annual exhibitions of paintings in the Paris Salon.
These reports are highly readable pieces of art criticism. According to Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, they initiated the French into a new way of laughing, and introduced people to the mystery and purport of colour by ideas. "Before Diderot," Anne Louise Germaine de Stael wrote, "I had never seen anything in pictures except dull and lifeless colours; it was his imagination that gave them relief and life, and it is almost a new sense for which I am indebted to his genius." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe described the Essai sur la peinture (1796) as "a magnificent work, which speaks even more helpfully to the poet than to the painter, though to the painter too it is as a blazing torch."
Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) was Diderot's favorite contemporary artist. Greuze's most characteristic pictures involved the rendering in colour of the same sentiments of domestic virtue and the pathos of common life that Diderot had attempted to represent upon the stage.


== Theatre ==
Diderot wrote sentimental plays, Le Fils naturel (1757) and Le Pere de famille (1758), accompanying them with essays on theatrical theory and practice, including "Les Entretiens sur Le Fils Naturel" (Conversations on The Natural Son), in which he announced the principles of a new drama: the 'serious genre', a realistic midpoint between comedy and tragedy that stood in opposition to the stilted conventions of the classical French stage. Diderot introduced the concept of the fourth wall, the imaginary "wall" at the front of the stage in a traditional three-walled box set in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play.


== Diderot and Catherine the Great ==

When the Russian Empress Catherine the Great heard that Diderot was in need of money she arranged for the purchase of Diderot's library and for the appointment of Diderot as the caretaker of this library till his death--at an annual retainer of one thousand livres. Moreover, she paid him twenty five years of his salary in advance. Thus, although he hated traveling, Diderot was obliged to accept her invitation to visit her.
On 9 October 1773 Diderot reached St. Petersburg, and met Catherine the next day. They then proceeded to have several discussions on various subjects; during his five-month stay at Catherine's court, he would meet the Empress almost every day. During these conversations, Diderot would--he would later state--speak with her 'man to man'; in doing so he would occasionally make his point by slapping the Empress's thighs.In a letter to Madame Geoffrin, Catherine wrote:

Your Diderot is an extraordinary man. I emerge from interviews with him with my thighs bruised and quite black. I have been obliged to put a table between us to protect myself and my members.

One of the topics discussed was Diderot's ideas about how to transform Russia into a Utopia. In a letter to Louis Philippe, comte de Segur, the Empress wrote:

If I had believed him everything would have been turned upside down in my kingdom; legislation, administration,finance--all would have been turned topsy-turvy to make room for impractical theories.

When returning, Diderot asked the Empress for fifteen hundred rubles as reimbursement for his trip. She gave him three thousand rubles, an expensive ring, and an officer to escort him back to Paris. He would write a eulogy in her honor on reaching Paris.
In July 1784, upon hearing that Diderot was keeping in poor health, Catherine arranged for him to move into a luxurious suite in the Rue de Richelieu. Diderot died two weeks after moving into the suite--on 31 July 1784.


== Philosophy ==
As a philosopher, Diderot speculated on free will and held a completely materialistic view of the universe; he suggested all human behavior is determined by heredity. He therefore warned his fellow philosophers against an overemphasis on mathematics and against the blind optimism that sees, in the growth of physical knowledge, an automatic social and human progress. As such, he rejected the Idea of Progress. In his opinion, the aim of progressing through technology was doomed to fail. He founded his philosophy on experiment and the study of probabilities. He wrote several articles and supplements concerning gambling, mortality rates, and inoculation against smallpox for the Encyclopedie. There, he discreetly but firmly refuted d'Alembert's technical errors and personal positions on probability.
In his youth, Diderot was originally a follower of Voltaire and his deist Anglomanie, but gradually moved away from this line of thought towards materialism and atheism, a move which was finally realised in 1747 in the philosophical debate in the second part of his La Promenade du sceptique (1747).
Diderot was not a coherent and systematic thinker, but rather "a philosopher in whom all the contradictions of the time struggle with one another"(Rosenkranz). He did not develop a comprehensive system of materialism, but he may have made some contributions to the atheistic materialist works of his friend Paul Henri Thiry, baron d'Holbach.
Diderot was above all things interested in the life of individuals. He did not care about the abstract life of the race, but the incidents of individual character, the fortunes of a particular family, the relations of real and concrete motives in this or that special case. He was delighted with the enthusiasm of a born casuist in curious puzzles of right and wrong, and in devising a conflict between the generalities of ethics and the conditions of an ingeniously contrived practical dilemma. Diderot's interest expressed itself in didactic and sympathetic form. However, in two of his most remarkable works, Le Neveu de Rameau and Jacques le fataliste, this interest is not sympathetic, but ironic.


== Appreciation and Influence ==
Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Stendhal, Balzac, and Delacroix expressed admiration for Diderot's writings. Michelet described Diderot as "the true Prometheus" and stated that Diderot's ideas would continue to remain influential long into the future. According to Comte, Diderot was the foremost intellectual in an exciting age. Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote in his Confessions that after a few centuries Diderot will be accorded as much respect by posterity as is given to Plato and Aristotle.Karl Marx chose Diderot as his "favourite prose-writer."


== Criticism ==
When she read some notes Diderot had written "On the Instructions of her Imperial Majesty...for the Drawing up of Laws", Catherine the Great commented that these were an incoherent gibberish devoid of prudence, insight, and verisimilitude. According to Voltaire: "Diderot is too hot an oven;everything that is baked in it gets burned."


== Contemporary tributes ==
Otis Fellows and Norman Torrey have described Diderot as "the most interesting and provocative figure of the French eighteenth century."

In 1993, American writer Cathleen Schine published "Rameau's Niece," a satire of academic life in New York that took as its premise a woman's research into an (imagined) 18th-century pornographic parody of Diderot's "Rameau's Nephew" titled "Rameau's Niece." The book was praised by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times as "a nimble philosophical satire of the academic mind" and "an enchanting comedy of modern manners."
The French author Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt wrote a play titled "Le Libertin" ("The Libertine") which imagines a day in Diderot's life including a fictional sitting for a woman painter which becomes sexually charged but is interrupted by the demands of editing the Encyclopedie. It was first staged at Paris' Theatre Montparnasse in 1997 starring Bernard Giraudeau as Diderot and Christiane Cohendy as Madame Therbouche and was well received by critics.
In 2013, the tricentennial of Diderot's birth, his hometown of Langres held a series of events in his honor and produced an audio tour of the town highlighting places that were part of Diderot's past, including the remains of the convent where his sister Angelique took her vows. On October 6, 2013, a museum of theEnlightenment focusing on Diderot's contributions to the movement, the Maison des Lumieres Denis Diderot, was inaugurated in Langres. http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/s259a.rap.html


== Bibliography ==

Essai sur le merite et la vertu, written by Shaftesbury French translation and annotation by Diderot (1745)
Pensees philosophiques, essay (1746)
La Promenade du sceptique (1747)
Les bijoux indiscrets, novel (1748)
Lettre sur les aveugles a l'usage de ceux qui voient (1749)
L'Encyclopedie, (1750-1765)
Lettre sur les sourds et muets (1751)
Pensees sur l'interpretation de la nature, essai (1751)
Le Fils naturel (1757)
Entretiens sur le Fils naturel (1757)
Le pere de famille (1758)
Discours sur la poesie dramatique (1758)
Salons, critique d'art (1759-1781)
La Religieuse, Roman (1760; revised in 1770 and in the early 1780s; the novel was first published as a volume posthumously in 1796).
Le neveu de Rameau, dialogue (1763).
Lettre sur le commerce de la librairie (1763)
Mystification ou l'histoire des portraits (1768)
Entretien entre D'Alembert et Diderot (1769)
Le reve de D'Alembert, dialogue (1769)
Suite de l'entretien entre D'Alembert et Diderot (1769)
Paradoxe sur le comedien (written between 1770 and 1778; first published posthumously in 1830)
Apologie de l'abbe Galiani (1770)
Principes philosophiques sur la matiere et le mouvement, essai (1770)
Entretien d'un pere avec ses enfants (1771)
Jacques le fataliste et son maitre, novel (1771-1778)
Madame de La Carliere, short story and moral fable, (1772)
Supplement au voyage de Bougainville (1772)
Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes, in collaboration with Raynal (1772-1781)
Voyage en Hollande (1773)
Elements de physiologie (1773-1774)
Refutation d'Helvetius (1774)
Observations sur le Nakaz (1774)
Essai sur les regnes de Claude et de Neron (1778)
Est-il Bon? Est-il mechant? (1781)
Lettre apologetique de l'abbe Raynal a Monsieur Grimm (1781)
Aux insurgents d'Amerique (1782)


== See also ==


== References ==
 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 


== Further reading ==
Anderson, Wilda C. Diderot's Dream. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
App, Urs (2010). The Birth of Orientalism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ISBN 978-0-8122-4261-4, pp. 133-87 on Diderot's role in the European discovery of Hinduism and Buddhism.
Azurmendi, Joxe (1984). Entretien d'un philosophe: Diderot (1713-1784), Jakin, 32: 111-121.
Ballstadt, Kurt P. A. Diderot: Natural Philosopher. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008.
Blom, Philipp (2010). The Wicked Company. New York: Basic Books
Blum, Carol (1974). Diderot: The Virtue of a Philosopher
Brewer, Daniel. Using the Encyclopedie: Ways of Knowing, Ways of Reading. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002.
Clark, Andrew Herrick. Diderot's Part. Aldershot, Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2008.
Caplan, Jay. Framed Narratives: Diderot's Genealogy of the Beholder. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1986.
Crocker, Lester G. (1974). Diderot's Chaotic Order: Approach to a Synthesis
De la Carrera, Rosalina. Success in Circuit Lies: Diderot's Communicational Practice. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 1991.
Fellows, Otis E. (1989). Diderot
France, Peter (1983). Diderot
Fontenay, Elisabeth de, and Jacques Proust. Interpreter Diderot Aujourd'hui. Paris: Le Sycomore, 1984.
Furbank, P. N. (1992). Diderot: A Critical Biography. New York: A. A. Knopf,. ISBN 0-679-41421-5.
Gregory Efrosini, Mary (2006). Diderot and the Metamorphosis of Species (Studies in Philosophy). New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-95551-3.
Havens, George R. (1955) The Age of Ideas. New York: Holt ISBN 0-89197-651-5.
Hayes, Julia Candler. The Representation of the Self in the Theater of La Chaussee, Diderot, and Sade. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1982.
Kavanagh, Thomas. "The Vacant Mirror: A Study of Mimesis through Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 104 (1973).
Kuzincki, Jason (2008). "Diderot, Denis (1713-1784)". In Hamowy, Ronald. The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE; Cato Institute. pp. 124-5. ISBN 978-1-4129-6580-4. LCCN 2008009151. OCLC 750831024. 
Mason, John H. (1982). The Irresistible Diderot
Rex, Walter E. Diderot's Counterpoints: The Dynamics of Contrariety in His Major Works. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998.
Saint-Amand, Pierre. Diderot. Saratoga, Calif.: Anma Libri, 1984.
Simon, Julia (1995). Mass Enlightenment. Albany: State University of New York Press,. ISBN 0-7914-2638-6.
Tunstall, Kate E. (2011). Blindness and Enlightenment. An Essay. With a new translation of Diderot's Letter on the Blind. Continuum
Wilson, Arthur McCandless (1972). Diderot, the standard biography
Vasco, Gerhard M. (1978). "Diderot and Goethe, A Study in Science and Humanism", Librairei Slatkine, Libraire Champion.


=== Primary sources ===
Diderot, Denis, ed. A Diderot Pictorial Encyclopedia of Trades and Industry, Vol. 1 (1993 reprint) excerpt and text search
Diderot, Denis. Diderot: Political Writings ed. by John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (1992) excerpt and text search, with introduction
Main works of Diderot in English translation
Hoyt, Nellie and Cassirer, Thomas. Encyclopedia, Selections: Diderot, D'Alembert, and a Society of Men of Letters. New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965. LCCN 65--26535. ISBN 0-672-60479-5.


== External links ==
Works by Denis Diderot at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Denis Diderot at Internet Archive
Works by Denis Diderot at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) 
Diderot Search engine in French for human sciences in tribute to Diderot
Denis Diderot: Reve d'Alembert (d'Alembert's Dream) (French and English texts)
Conversation between D'Alembert and Diderot (alternate translation of the first part of the above)
Denis Diderot Archive (English)
Denis Diderot Website (in French)
(French) On line version of the Encyclopedie. The articles are classified in alphabetical order (26 files).
The ARTFL Encyclopedie, provided by the ARTFL Project of the University of Chicago (articles in French, scans of 18th century print copies provided)
The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, product of the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library (an effort to translate the Encyclopedie into English)
Short biography
Denis Diderot Bibliography
Le Neveu de Rameau - Diderot et Goethe