Denis Diderot Quotes on Knowledge
Denis Diderot (1713–1784), the chief editor of the Encyclopédie (1751–72) — the principal monument of Enlightenment knowledge organization — gave eighteenth-century French materialism its most supple philosophical voice across D'Alembert's Dream, the Letter on the Blind, and the Refutation of Helvétius. The framework couples a thoroughgoing sensationist empiricism with a dynamic and proto-evolutionary conception of matter, against both the rationalist metaphysics of substance and the more mechanical materialism of contemporaries such as La Mettrie and Helvétius. The Encyclopédie's systematic article "Encyclopédie" gives Diderot's most explicit statement of the philosophical theory of organized knowledge that the project embodied.
Quotes
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“Skepticism is the first step toward truth.”
Scepticism is the first step towards truth. -
“The first step towards philosophy is incredulity.”
Scepticism is the first step towards truth. -
Attributed to Denis Diderot:
“We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many keys struck by the nature surrounding us, and which often strike themselves.”
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“Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.”
As quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts : Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations (1908) by Tryon Edwards , p. 338 -
“Portraying a fictional conversation of Nicholas Saunderson with a priest, in ' Lettre sur les aveugles [ Letter about the Blind ] (1749), as quoted in Diderot and the Encyclopædists (1897) by John Morley, p. 92. Publication of this work resulted in Diderot being arrested and imprisoned.”
If you want me to believe in God , you must make me touch him. -
“Lettre sur les aveugles [ Letter on the Blind ] (1749)”
As to all the outward signs that awaken within us feelings of sympathy and compassion, the blind are only affected by crying; I suspect them in general of lacking humanity. What difference is there for a blind man, between a man who is urinating, and man who, without crying out, is bleeding? And we ourselves, do we not cease to commiserate, when the distance or the smallness of the objects in ques -
“Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things.”
Apology for the Abbé de Prades (1752) -
“Apology for the Abbé de Prades (1752)”
Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things.