Denis Diderot

Diderot was born in Langres in 1713, the son of a cutler, and arrived in Paris to make his fortune as a writer. For twenty years, from 1751 to 1772, he served as the chief editor of the Encyclopedie, a project that aimed to assemble and disseminate all human knowledge. He begged, cajoled, and bullied contributors, wrote hundreds of articles himself, and fought the censors who tried to suppress it. In private, he wrote more freely: Rameau's Nephew, a brilliant dialogue on genius and mediocrity, and D'Alembert's Dream, a materialist account of consciousness that reads more like a twentieth-century novel than an eighteenth-century treatise. He believed that matter, if organized complexly enough, could think. He was right, in ways he could not have imagined.