Denis diderot biography summary of winston
Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the Encyclopédie.
Denis Diderot (October 5, – July 31, ) was a philosopher and writer.!
Denis Diderot
1. Diderot’s Life and Major Writings
Diderot’s long, varied, and eventful life can be presented in four distinct phases:
- a period of maturation amidst struggle in the 1730s–40s as the impoverished young Diderot sought to establish himself as a writer in Old Regime Paris through the pursuit of the highly precarious vocation of writing and publishing;
- a period of intellectual ascent after 1749 as Diderot used the new financial stability and intellectual notoriety acquired by editing the Encyclopédie to build a base for his mature career as an Enlightenment writer, critic, and philosophe;;
- a period of intellectual celebrity as the new freedom brought about by the completion of the Encyclopédie in 1765 allowed Diderot to produce some of his most important, if often unpublished, work;
- a twilight period begun in 1773 after his financial burdens were fully eliminated through Empress Catherine the Great of Russia’s lucrative