Diderot: A Critical Biography

Philip Nicholas Furbank is an English writer, scholar and critic, who has written biographies such as E. M. Forster: A Life; his biography of Diderot won a Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was a French Enlightenment philosopher best known for his championing of the "Encyclopedia, or a systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts." Furbank notes that "he could be clumsy in his dealings with public opinion," and that "He was eager to make converts, but not so much to atheism as to philosophy and reason." Diderot's famous statement, "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest" is included, of course, with Furbank noting that "it was the benevolent Diderot who composed the phrase, in a festive New Year's Eve poem, nearly twenty years before the Revolution." Furbank also observes that "It was no empty boast of Diderot's that he gave up half his existence to other people's concerns." He also writes, "In later years Diderot came to be known by the nickname of 'The Philosopher,'" although ultimately he had 'begun to fret at the role implied ... that is to say, a being made a sort of circus-turn or public monument of, a curiosity every visitor to Paris had to be shown." This is an excellent and comprehensive biography of an important figure in philosophy (even though he, ironically, wrote no real "major" philosophic works).