This two-volume set presents a comprehensive and up-to-date history of eighteenth-century philosophy. The subject is treated systematically by topic, not by individual thinker, school, or movement, thus enabling a much more historically nuanced picture of the period to be painted.

Because of its fragmentary, evolving, exploratory, and dialectical character, Diderot's thought has continuously resisted overall synthesis. In the ideas of "order" and "disorder," ideas important in all of eighteenth-century thought, Lester G. Crocker finds the key to an outline of a structure that leads to a genuine synthesis of Diderot's writings on philosophy, morality, politics, and aesthetics. The tensions in Diderot's thought, Professor Crocker shows, reflect his understanding of reality itself—paradoxically, an anarchic order, a dynamic universe governed by laws but always changing in a chaotic way. The book examines Diderot's approach to aesthetics as a human ordering response to the world, and his approach to morals and politics as practical ways of dealing with the problems of order and disorder in the context of life in society. In light of the concepts of order and disorder, the inextricable associations of all of these realms of thought in Diderot's work become clear, and a unity is perceived. Since the problem of order and disorder was fundamental to an age faced with the dissolution of the Christian view of cosmic order, this novel approach to Diderot's work suggests new ways of understanding the Enlightenment as a whole. Originally published in 1974. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In the late eighteenth century, an array of European political thinkers attacked the very foundations of imperialism, arguing passionately that empire-building was not only unworkable, costly, and dangerous, but manifestly unjust. Enlightenment against Empire is the first book devoted to the anti-imperialist political philosophies of an age often regarded as affirming imperial ambitions. Sankar Muthu argues that thinkers such as Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottfried Herder developed an understanding of humans as inherently cultural agents and therefore necessarily diverse. These thinkers rejected the conception of a culture-free "natural man." They held that moral judgments of superiority or inferiority could be made neither about entire peoples nor about many distinctive cultural institutions and practices. Muthu shows how such arguments enabled the era's anti-imperialists to defend the freedom of non-European peoples to order their own societies. In contrast to those who praise "the Enlightenment" as the triumph of a universal morality and critics who view it as an imperializing ideology that denigrated cultural pluralism, Muthu argues instead that eighteenth-century political thought included multiple Enlightenments. He reveals a distinctive and underappreciated strand of Enlightenment thinking that interweaves commitments to universal moral principles and incommensurable ways of life, and that links the concept of a shared human nature with the idea that humans are fundamentally diverse. Such an intellectual temperament, Muthu contends, can broaden our own perspectives about international justice and the relationship between human unity and diversity.

As contemporary thinkers continue to explore the intellectual affinities that bind the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, their attention has turned with increasing frequency to Diderot. Focusing on models of communication, this book draws on an interdisciplinary configuration – a conjunction of communication theory, philosophy of science, and literary theory – to analyze texts from Diderot's own interdisciplinary corpus. Of particular pertinence to the author's argument is Michel Serres's model of dialogue. Rejecting the traditional notion of dialogue as a binary exchange, Serres defines it instead as the product of the association of two interlocutors, who join forces against a third term – another interlocutor or background noise – that threatens to disrupt the exchange. Serres thus substitutes a ternary model of dialogue for the conventional binary one. Using Serres's model as a point of departure, the author not only identifies specific instances of Diderot's use of a ternary communicational model but, more important, also demonstrates how Diderot's writings themselves generate a ternary model of communication that is uniquely his. She does this by tracing the model through texts drawn from domains as diverse as fiction, history, and natural philosophy. The repeated recurrence of Diderot's ternary model in these different contexts brings into focus an unexpected unity in what at first looks like a disparate corpus. As the analysis proceeds, furthermore, it also becomes clear that Diderot's materialist philosophy dictates a rhetoric aiming at the sensitive body just as much as the reasoning mind. Though the astounding diversity of Diderot's writings – as encyclopedist, novelist, playwright, philosopher, scientific theorist, and art critic – has most often led critics to avoid the question of what coherences there might be within that diversity, in this book the author asks just that question - and goes far toward providing a convincing, satisfying, and stimulating answer. The book includes a new translation of the Préface-annexe of La Religieuse, the integral part of Diderot's novel missing from most readily available English-language editions.