The Life of Denis Diderot

07/04/19 • 59 min

Denis Diderot was an 18th-century French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the Encyclopédia along with Jean le Rond d’Alembert. He was an important member of the Age of Enlightenment, who claims the Encyclopédia as its crowning achievement. Diderot used his influence in society to bring to light the unfair treatment of the working class caused by his contemporaries in power. However, his work brought the wrath of the government upon him. Today, we bring in Andrew S. Curran to give us a closer look at Diderot’s life and the politics of his era.

Guest: Andrew S. Curran is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities. He has served on the editorial board of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture and is presently on the board of Critical Philosophy of Race and Diderot Studies. Curran also received a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars award in 2016. He has authored such books as Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s Universe, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment, as well as the topic of today’s show, Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely.

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Previous Episode

The Uncivilized Nature of Civilization

The common notion of the beginnings of civilization is that it was remarkably better than a nomadic hunter and gatherer type of existence. It is in fact the opposite; early cities and city-states throughout history were so miserable that these early states went to war in order to capture slaves to keep the city operating, and that’s one reason why slavery was endemic to the so-called civilized world. Today, renowned anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott of Yale University gives us a deeper look into the reality of such ancient Mesopotamian societies using his latest book.

Guest: James C. Scott is an American political scientist and anthropologist. He is a comparative scholar of agrarian and non-state societies, subaltern politics, and anarchism. He has also authored many books, such as Seeing Like a State, The Art of Not Being Governed, as well as his newest and the topic of today’s show, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.

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Next Episode

The Community of Grace: The Bay Area’s Unhoused Communities

Take a look inside one of the new symbols of the San Fransisco Bay Area; a tent village where many unhoused people live in the middle of our cities, in one of the wealthiest regions in the world. We will explore this encampment using the interviews and recordings of its own residents. Since 2015 there has been a 25% increase in the homeless population just in Oakland, which has recently brought camps like the one in this documentary to the city administration’s attention. Today, we talk to Lucy Kang about her documentary and what she learned during her extended research into the Community of Grace and its inhabitants.

Guest: Lucy Kang is a journalist and producer at KPFA. Most recently she has come out with her radio documentary on one of Oakland’s unhoused communities, entitled The Community of Grace. Kang spent over two months visiting and recording interviews with the residents of this community to give us this look into the reality of homelessness.

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