The Atheist's Bible
Diderot's 'Éléments de physiologie'
by Caroline Warman
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The Atheist's Bible challenges prevailing scholarly views on Diderot's Éléments, asserting its contemporary philosophical importance, and prompting its readers to inspect more closely this little-known and little-studied work. In this timely volume, Warman establishes the place of Diderot's Éléments in the trajectory of materialist theories of nature and the mind stretching back to Epicurus and Lucretius, and explores the fascinating reasons behind scholarly neglect of this seminal work. In turn, Warman outlines the hitherto unacknowledged dissemination and reception of Diderot's Éléments, demonstrating how Diderot's Éléments was circulated in manuscript-form as early as the 1790s, thus showing how the text came to influence the next generations of materialist thinkers.
This book is accompanied by a digital edition of Jacques-André Naigeon's Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot (1823), a work which, Warman argues, represents the first publication of Diderot's Éléments, long before its official publication date of 1875.
The Atheist's Bible constitutes a major contribution to the field of Diderot studies, and will be of further interest to scholars and students of materialist natural philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment and beyond. 
Book Description
'Love is harder to explain than hunger, for a piece of fruit does not feel the desire to be eaten': Denis Diderot's Éléments de physiologie presents a world in flux, turning on the relationship between man, matter and mind. In this late work, Diderot delves playfully into the relationship between bodily sensation, emotion and perception, and asks his readers what it means to be human in the absence of a soul.The Atheist's Bible challenges prevailing scholarly views on Diderot's Éléments, asserting its contemporary philosophical importance, and prompting its readers to inspect more closely this little-known and little-studied work. In this timely volume, Warman establishes the place of Diderot's Éléments in the trajectory of materialist theories of nature and the mind stretching back to Epicurus and Lucretius, and explores the fascinating reasons behind scholarly neglect of this seminal work. In turn, Warman outlines the hitherto unacknowledged dissemination and reception of Diderot's Éléments, demonstrating how Diderot's Éléments was circulated in manuscript-form as early as the 1790s, thus showing how the text came to influence the next generations of materialist thinkers.
This book is accompanied by a digital edition of Jacques-André Naigeon's Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot (1823), a work which, Warman argues, represents the first publication of Diderot's Éléments, long before its official publication date of 1875.
The Atheist's Bible constitutes a major contribution to the field of Diderot studies, and will be of further interest to scholars and students of materialist natural philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment and beyond.
This open book is licensed under a Creative Commons License (CC BY). You can download The Atheist's Bible ebook for free in PDF format (39.0 MB).
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Introduction: The Curious Materialist
Chapter 2
'Toutes les imperfections de l'inachèvement': The Mystification about the Manuscript Fragments
Chapter 3
Material World and Embodied Mind
Chapter 4
Diderot the Physiologist
Chapter 5
1790: Naigeon and the Adresse à l'Assemblée nationale
Chapter 6
1792: Naigeon's Article on 'Diderot' in the Encyclopédie méthodique: Philosophie ancienne et moderne
Chapter 7
1794: 'Le citoyen Garron', the Comité d'instruction publique, and the Lost Manuscript of the Éléments de physiologie
Chapter 8
1794-95: Garat and the École normale
Chapter 9
1796-97: Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy at the Institut national
Chapter 10
1798, 1802: Naigeon, the OEuvres de Diderot, and the Censored Preface to Montaigne
Chapter 11
1820: Garat's Mémoires historiques sur la vie de M. Suard, sur ses écrits, et sur le XVIIIe siècle
Chapter 12
1823: Naigeon's Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot
Chapter 13
Conclusion
Book Details
Title
The Atheist's Bible
Publisher
Open Book Publishers
Published
2020
Pages
444
Edition
1
Language
English
ISBN13
9781783748969
ISBN10
1783748966
ISBN13 Digital
9781783748983
ISBN10 Digital
1783748982
PDF Size
39.0 MB
License
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