Diderot and the ancients

Abstract

Diderot seems in many ways to be the most forward-looking, the most ‘modern’, of the eighteenth-century French philosophes. Even his attitude to his works, just as much as the content and form of them, suggests this: although he composed many of what we now regard as his most important works without thought of conventional publication in his lifetime, he nevertheless did so with a keen eye on posterity. He fervently hoped that the future would be as interested in him as he was in it, as he suggests in a letter to the sculptor Étienne-Maurice Falconet in December 1765: ‘En vérité, cette postérité serait une ingrate si elle m'oubliait tout à fait, moi qui me suis tant souvenu d'elle.’ (‘Indeed..