Denis Diderot Research Articles

The study of mental disorders in visually impaired people

The purpose of this review is to highlight the history of the study of mental characteristics in persons with eye pathology and visual impairment. In the period of the Ancient World and up to the XIV century, the knowledge of the human psyche passed through the prism of mystical and religious views on the essence of the human soul. The beginning of the application of the materialistic approach to the assessment of mental characteristics in the absence of vision can be considered the work of the French writer, philosopher and educator Denis Diderot. In his "Letters" he drew attention to the need to educate the blind, which became the impetus for the activities of future specialists. In the middle of the XIX century, active work began in the field of research on the psyche of the blind. The introspective description served as the basis for the beginning of the experimental study. There is a spontaneous release of typhlopsychology, which formed the theoretical basis for the further development of science. During the 20th century, a large amount of experimental data has been accumulated in the field of studying the psyche of the blind. Modern multicenter studies of the psychological characteristics of ophthalmic patients indicate a wide prevalence of mental disorders. Scientists are currently paying close attention to specific ophthalmological nosologies and their relationship with certain mental disorders. Research is being conducted to study potential ophthalmological markers for the development of mental disorders and to find ways to diagnose them instrumentally. Despite the long and difficult path of studying the characteristics of the psyche in visually impaired people, there is still a vast field for further research. Based on past knowledge, future developments will allow us to more accurately determine the relationship between eye pathology and mental disorders.

Is it true? Another view in the conversation between science, pseudo-science and faith

This contribution is founded on a forty-year friendship between two university psychology professors, for whom dialogue on science and religion has been a perennial theme. At a previous conference they collaborated on a paper on the psychology of religion. The present paper attempts to further this conversation with a dialogue on truth, science, pseudoscience, and faith. The dialogue is structured around a theme from Denis Diderot that the basis of philosophy is incredulity. The ensuing conversation, which interrogates the meaning of science and truth, includes various questions and answers

Performing the self: the construction of Casa Malaparte as living images

The paper discusses architectural design as a transdisciplinary practice that interlinks architecture, performance, and the moving image through a building example: the Casa Malaparte, the house of Italian writer Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957) built in Capri, Italy, between 1938 and 1942. Malaparte stated many times that he considered his house the best portrait of himself and he called the Casa Malaparte ‘A House Like Me’. Through theoretical, archival, and fieldwork research, the paper argues that the house performs Malaparte's autobiography. Unlike the conventional architectural design process, the Casa Malaparte was built by its owner Curzio Malaparte in collaboration with a master builder in an improvisational manner that incorporated methods of cinematic framing, material collage, and assemblage. The house is discussed as a self-portrait of its inhabitant questioning what could be architecture's role in mirroring the self and theorises Casa Malaparte's creation as a practice that works in between architecture, performance, and the visual arts. By drawing on Bertolt Brecht's ‘alienation effect’, Antonin Artaud's ‘theatre of cruelty’, and Denis Diderot discussion of the ‘tableau vivant’ which literally means ‘living pictures’, the paper provides theoretical frameworks that bring together spatial and performance theories. The Casa Malaparte as a tableau vivant is discussed as an alternative performative device that can potentially expand architectural design and render it as a living practice.

Prince Dmitry Golitsyn’s Program Speech “On Drawing” (1769): The Origin of the Text and Its Historical and Aesthetic Significance

The article is dedicated to the speech “On Drawing” by the honorary member of the Imperial Academy of Arts, Prince Dmitry Alekseevich Golitsyn (1734–1803), which he delivered in July 1769 at a solemn public meeting of the Academy. Its text was discovered in the Russian State Historical Archive in the middle of the 20th century and was long considered his original work, written first in French and then translated into Russian. The main outcome of the research conducted by the authors of this article was the discovery of the original source of this text by Golitsyn, namely the beginning of the dialogue of the same title from the French edition of the book by the English traveler and writer Daniel Webb “Recherches sur les beautésde la peinture” (1765). Since the Englishman’s book was the result of his tour to Rome, where he has met the scholar J. J. Winckelmann and the painter A. R. Mengs, an amateur art historian, Webb, retelling in his essay the thoughts of German theorists about imitation of ancient artists, unwittingly became a transmission link in the arrival of neoclassical ideas to Russia. Denis Diderot got acquainted with the French translation of Webb’s book before Golitsyn, wrote an essay about it for F. M. Grimm’s “La Correspondance littéraire” and, apparently, recommended it to the prince. However, Golitsyn did not copy word-for-word Webb’s text, but adapted it for his purpose — to compose a program speech to the high assembly of Russia’s main educational institution in the field of fine arts, which is gaining strength. Unlike Wincklemann and Webb, who appealed exclusively to the past, the Russian aristocrat, following Diderot, saw the future progress of modern art not in blind imitation of ancient masters, but in the revival of the emotional and intellectual power of ancient art through the efforts of free artists. The political conditions of the Russian Empire during the reign of Catherine II predetermined the laudatory tone of his speech in the spirit of the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV.

We have never been human: Staging subjectivity from Diderot and Artaud to the aesthetics of the European refugee crisis

This essay explores the shifting matrix underlying the pervasive theater that enacts the making and unmaking of human subjectivity by focusing on key historical transformations and prominent contemporary manifestations. Offering a comparative analysis of Denis Diderot’s theory of the actor, and Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty, I argue that the paradox of the human had led to human–artwork hybrids well before the digital age of the posthuman recast the body as virtuality. Drawing on a broader understanding and scope of human–artwork hybridization, I examine two different yet equally memorable and infamous responses in 2015 to the European refugee crisis: the Petra László video and Norbert Baksa’s Der Migrant. The aesthetic and cultural practices revolving around the staging of the European refugee crisis constitute a key sphere in which this hybridization is tested, played out and in the context of East-Central Europe, calibrated to a ballad tradition whose generic conventions were reinvented in conjunction with a growing national identity in the 19th century. The ballad of ‘The Walled-Up Wife’ has enjoyed sustained popularity in East-Central Europe, ever since its anachronistic ‘rediscovery’ in multiple national literatures around the mid 1800s. It deserves critical attention, for its extensive cultural history as well as its rich vernacular heritage can shed new light on the ways in which the idea of material embodiment comes to bear extended meanings for a reconceptualization of the human in digital spaces of aesthetic rather than merely socio-political signification.

The Captivated Gaze. Diderot’s Allegory of the Cave and Democracy

ABSTRACT The problem of the captivated gaze has been taken up repeatedly in philosophy. Plato's Allegory of the Cave stands paradigmatically for this. Here, the gaze at the shadowy images prevents people from taking the path to the sun. Denis Diderot's critical reinterpretation of Plato's Allegory of the Cave is less well known. In Diderot, the view of the artificial light images is just as captivating as Plato's shadow images. Unlike there, however, Diderot does not distinguish between perception and cognition but instead focuses on the significance of the seemingly unimportant shift of the gaze within the cave. Diderot determines the starting point of the realisation of freedom in the liberation of one's own gaze from the captivation intended by third parties. Prerequisites for the liberation of the gaze are the realisation of an interruption. It is shifts in the alignment of the eyeballs that become visible here as lucid intervals and which, in Diderot, become the starting point of power analysis and the site of revolt and freedom practice. In this article, I will show how Diderot's demand for enabling the individual realisation of lucid intervals is not first and foremost an aesthetic, but a highly political one. The criteria of art, which are defined by Diderot and have not lost their relevance until today, are based on his explosive insight that the incessant captivation of the gaze stands in the way of democratisation.

Textuelle Infrastrukturen des Theaters. Dramaturgie als Vermittlung

Textuelle Infrastrukturen des Theaters<b>. Dramaturgie als Vermittlung</b>

Expansive Energy: An Alternative Portrait of Denis Diderot

Abstract: Historians of the Enlightenment are stymied by Denis Diderot's cloven polymathy. An insoluble dilemma arises between, on one hand, the amazing range of interests attested in his roles as both editor and contributor for the Encyclopédie and, on the other hand, his incorrigible dilettantism, in the centrifugal and often inconclusive pursuit of whatever topic came his way. We will do better to relinquish synthesis and highlight instead the multiplicity and versatility of Diderot's productive exuberance as such. We can then see how, rather than build arguments, he metabolized ideas into designs exhibiting a constantly increasing complexity that matched his inexhaustible energy. We can also appreciate his lifelong habit of writing in response to outside, and more or less random, prompts and assignments. An accidental polymath, Diderot preferred the pursuit of a train of thought over disciplined conclusiveness: witness his preference for dialogue over more integrative forms driven by argumentative power. A stranger to disciplinary methodology, he would nowadays be a journalist, not an academic.

Poetics and problems of the play “The Libertine” by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt

The article studies the analysis of the dramatic legacy of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, a famous modern French-speaking writer. The article discusses one of his most famous plays, &lt;i&gt;The Libertine&lt;/i&gt;. We studied the genre-typological properties of the play and the system of its characters, we actualized the reality of the prototypes of the actors of the play, traced the architectonics of the play. We studied the peculiarities of the organization of plots, protagonist images and their systems in the play &lt;i&gt;The Libertine&lt;/i&gt;, we analyzed the motives, leitmotifs, chronotopes, themes and issues, which allowed to single out the main conflict of the play. We used comparative-historical, comparative-typological and structural methods to study the stated issues. One of the key factors in choosing the main character of the work, Denis Diderot, whose work inspired the playwright not only to write a dissertation on philosophy and was the source of many worldview ideas, but also to write a fictional literary work and biography. The play &lt;i&gt;The Libertine&lt;/i&gt; is written in the style of French classicist works with a focus on the unity of time, place, action. The famous Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot, who is working on the article &lt;i&gt;Morality&lt;/i&gt; in his famous &lt;i&gt;Encyclopedia&lt;/i&gt;, appears in the play by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt as the embodiment of immorality. Each character introduced by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt into the play represents one of the facets of the moral issue around which the play revolves. The problem of morality is constant in this play by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, that makes it sharpness, dynamism, it revolves around the whole dramatic conflict and the pervasive action of the play. The specificity of the philosophy of language of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, on the one hand, is based on dialogical discourse, and on the other, manifested in the comic, in humor. In this sense, humor is not a tool to ridicule Denis Diderot, but rather calls for a more lenient attitude of the reader to human weaknesses. Typical of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's work is the open finale of the play, the actualization of important metaphysical questions that remain unanswered.

Жанры литературного творчества Дени Дидро: эссе, диалоги, повести, художественные очерки

The aim of the study is to reveal the key features of literary genres in Denis Diderot’s works. Diderot was one of the most prominent figures in French culture – philosopher, novelist, dramatist and art theorist, who made a significant contribution to the literary enlightenment of the French society. The scientific novelty of this research lies in carrying out a comprehensive analysis and determining the originality of Diderot’s literary criticism contribution to the development and formation of such literary genres of the Enlightenment as literary essays, dialogues, moral tales, artistic and critic essays, which became a historical and literary phenomenon of that period. Diderot’s writings are studied within the dynamics of his ideas, and this approach allows us to define him as a versatile person and sophisticated thinker-encyclopaedist. The results of the research prove that Diderot as a paradoxical figure of the French Enlightenment experimented with the genres incorporating the ordinary into the theoretical, literary and philosophical contexts that had a significant influence on the existing literary genres and provided the emergence of new ones in the XVIII century. Denis Diderot’s works are of educational nature as he managed to influence the public opinion and helped the thinking viewers and readers to form judgements on issues of universal significance for humanity based on common sense.

Satire and Sensibility: Rameau's Nephew

Abstract: This essay offers a new interpretation of Rameau's Nephew , often regarded as one of the most perplexing pieces by Denis Diderot, that attends to the interconnectedness of his works. When considered in light of Paradox of Actor which reads as a companion piece to Rameau's Nephew alongside Elements of Physiology and Diderot's political writing, LUI's tearful behaviours reveal a sensibility sensitive to the suffering that took place in mid-eighteenth-century France. This sensibility helps reveal LUI as an exemplar of both the clavecin-philosophe discussed in D'Alembert's Dream and the "fanatical philosophe" in Observations on the Nakaz . Hovering between genius and mediocrity, LUI also emerges as a pretended fool who fools his spectators with theatrical illusions: despite showing an antihero appearance, he ironically, by unmasking falsehood, comes closer to resembling a sentimental bourgeois hero (albeit one with a satirical spirit) in a tyrannical society where no one triumphs as a truth-telling hero. Living in the shadow of his famed uncle, he also demonstrates that the basis of noble sensibility lies not in noble titles. Rameau's Nephew ultimately unfolds as not just a satire but also a comédie larmoyante , for it, as Paradox puts it, deals not only "with a tartufe" but "with the Tartufe," an idea that can be traced back to Molière's play Tartuffe which presents Tartuffe as an archetypal figure who epitomises moral and religious hypocrisy.

베르네의 해양화에 나타난 바다의 소리풍경 연구

The purpose of this study is to examine what Claude-Joseph Vernet tried to realize by vividly evoking auditory images in his marine paintings and what it means through the analysis of the soundscapes in these paintings. As a result of analyzing 141 pieces of this artist's marine paintings, which are classified into three themes of 'storm', 'calm', and 'French harbor', a total of 1,302 elements of soundscape appeared, and these created images of 'disaster' in the theme of 'storm', 'invitation to a journey' in the theme of 'calm', and 'prosperity' in the theme of 'French harbor', thus confirming the perception that Vernet's contemporaries had about the sea. These research results allow us to interpret the artist's marine paintings more broadly from the perspective of the sea itself, rather than looking only at Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime, like Denis Diderot.

The ‘Diderot Objection’ to Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology

AbstractIn response to Pascal's famous wager argument for adopting Christian belief, Denis Diderot noted that ‘An Imam could just as well reason this way’. In this article, I will show how Diderot's observation about Pascal's argument can legitimately be made about Alvin Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology (RE) and its use in defending the rationality of Christian belief. Plantinga's RE can, with some minor adjustments, easily be adopted by Muslims. I shall argue that an Islamic analogue of Plantinga's Christian RE presents an undercutting rationality defeater for Christian belief for those reflective Christians who adopt Plantinga-style religious epistemology. I call this defeater the ‘Diderot Objection’ to Plantinga's RE. As part of my discussion, I will consider how Plantinga attempts to respond to this sort of objection and will show why his response runs into difficulties.

Жанры литературного творчества Дени Дидро

The paper aims at revealing the features of the artistic worldview of Denis Diderot, one of the most prominent figures in French culture, a philosopher, prose writer, playwright, art theorist, who made a significant contribution to the literary enlightenment of the French society. The scientific originality of the paper lies in considering the dynamics of the French enlightener’s views and conducting a comprehensive analysis of Diderot’s literary contribution to establishing and developing such literary genres of the era as novels together with “serious comedies” (dramas), which proved to be a historical and literary phenomenon of the Enlightenment. The study of Diderot’s creative work allows the researcher to define him as a versatile personality, original thinker and encyclopaedist. As a result, it has been proved that being a central and paradoxical personality of the Enlightenment era, Denis Diderot consciously combined everyday, theoretical, artistic and philosophical thinking in his literary works, which was manifested in his contribution to the development of literary genres common for the XVIII century and to the establishment of new ones. The analysis of the content of the French writer’s works shows that they are enlightening, since their author as a thinker and writer used a “creative method”, as defined by G. Gachev, that smoothed the sharp distinction between him as an artist, critic and philosopher.

Meisterstreich - formiranje pojma genija i kraj normativne estetike

The concept of beauty, based on the criterion of taste, marks the boundary that separates the era of normative aesthetics of classicism from the time when rejected elements played a decisive role in art. These elements include the subjectivation of experience, individual feelings as the driving force in the reception of art, and the individualization of criteria for judging artistic values. A new term emerges as the equivalent of rationalist sensus communis and classicist raison. This term can be tentatively defined as moderation (bon sens) or more narrowly, as politeness. While ancient art embodies unchanging and universal norms of artistic creation, leading to a historico-philosophical dualism, pre-romanticism, with its emphasis on sentimentality, demands a conceptual differentiation and nuancing of rational rules, taking into account cultural-philosophical and collective-psychological factors that modify those rules to fit specific creative contexts. Within sentimentalist-romantic theories of artistic creativity, the problem of genius arises, countering the rigid prescriptionism of pseudo-Horacian poetics and notions of mimesis as the constant imitation of immediate events and actions, and their 'possible' or 'probable' variants. An ingenious work of art in this context, relies not only on the strength of feelings and the immediacy of the artist's experience, but also on their ability to shape a flawless paradigm in their mind through unreflective, imaginative transposition. This paradigm is then brought to life using relevant materials. A genius artist does not oppose the rules in their creation; on the contrary, they understands them more deeply and reliably than someone who, in a fervent pursuit of innovation, abandons the safe and shortest path to artistic truth. Abbé Du Bos, Denis Diderot, and Johann Georg Hamann have delved into thisissue, shedding light on it and interpreting it from different angles, making lasting contributions to the aesthetics and theory of pre-romantic and romantic art.

Reflections on the Unnarratable: Free Will, the Intentional Stance, and a Narrative Model for Emergence

Reflections on the Unnarratable: Free Will, the Intentional Stance, and a Narrative Model for Emergence1 Toon Staes (bio) Let me begin with a quotation that also frames the introduction to this special issue, from David Herman’s “Narrative, Science, and Narrative Science,” now almost a quarter-century old: “science will not be left unchanged by its encounter with narrative inquiry, but neither will narrative inquiry” (383). The past two decades have seen this prediction come true, or at least its second part, with cognitive narratology. The first part, whether narrative inquiry has changed science, remains a tricky question. Herman’s claim suggests that science has its own style and rhetoric, structured by narrative. And yet, when narratologists train their lens on scientific discourse—the contributors to the present issue included—they usually imply that narrative lacks the precision that science demands. Science communication studies often voice a similar concern: at best, ‘storytelling’ oversimplifies the results of experimental research, but more likely, it distorts them (Katz; Dahlstrom, “(Escaping) the Paradox”). Such concern is not altogether a surprise, given that science works with testable ideas, whereas narratives deal with perspective and interpretation. But the news for narratologists is not all bad: if done responsibly, narratives can make a meaningful connection between science and human experience, thus making factual information more palatable (Dahlstrom, “The Narrative Truth”). This essay will suggest that science narratives which seek to explain unnarratable phenomena choose narrativity over accuracy in order to [End Page 87] get their message across,2 but perhaps, for experienced readers, that shouldn’t even come as a revelation. As literary theorists recognize, novels can help us navigate abstract science (see, for example, Caracciolo and Trauvitch in this issue). While my concern is not with fiction, one example will suffice to demonstrate my purpose. Early in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), we find ourselves at a séance in London in December 1944. German V-2 rockets are dropping nearby, but attendees of the séance—an eclectic bunch of scientists, mystics, and military men—gather around to hear a recently deceased engineer sound off about control mechanisms, or feedback loops, which supposedly give systems such as free financial markets the capacity to regulate themselves: A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself—its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened—that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, more harmful illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable. (30, original emphasis) The passage is quite difficult to unpack, even in the context of Pynchon’s mega-novel, but readers can already see some of the book’s larger themes come into focus: issues of freedom and control, choice and responsibility, technological determinism, and the rise of the military-industrial complex that would soon shape the course of world history. The passage also introduces the problem of free will, which, from the perspective of Pynchon’s speaker, doesn’t exist at all. If we are just cogs in a vast machine, he appears to ask, how can we act freely? Or: how could our lives and actions have meaning when things “only happen,” when we have no control over the rules and laws that govern them? Of course, it is one of the novel’s many ironies that the speaker here is a spirit medium channeling the words of a dead man, a ghost in the machine, whose presence in the book seems to suggest that we are more than soulless mechanisms. The problem the passage presents falls into the category of problems [End Page 88] that push against the limits of our understanding, or “representationally hungry problems” (Spolsky 50–51). Representationally hungry problems confuse and intrigue us. They test our ability to solve them in satisfying ways, which explains the constant “hunger” to represent them, for instance, in literature.3 Denis Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist and his Master (1796...

A questão das emoções e da vivência estética: o diálogo entre Vigotski e Stanislávski em torno da psicologia do ator

Abstract The paper examines the occurrences of the perezhivanie concept in Vygotsky’s texts about art, particularly the essay on Hamlet, written in 1915, The Psychology of Art, written in 1925, and the book chapter Aesthetic Education, published in Educational Psychology in 1926. Then, the paper focuses on the text "On the problem of the psychology of the actor's creative work," aiming to understand how Vygotsky critically analyses the ideas of Denis Diderot and Konstantin Stanislavsky to propose his original outlook on the psychology of the actor's scenic perezhivanie. The paper seeks to contextualize the 1932 text in Vygotsky's framework of interests that articulate theatrical art and the study of emotions against the background of previous writings.

Les inexplicables silences de L’« Encyclopédie» envers le mot « porcelaine»

The “Encyclopédie” of Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert was printed between 1751 and 1772. It consisted of 74 000 entries distributed in 17 volumes chronologically published accordingly to the alphabet. The word “porcelain” comes up in volume VI in 1756. The article was entrusted to chevalier de Jaucourt who edited it alongside 15 000 other entries. Jaucourt does not appear to be the most capable author for this task. He seems to have indeed satisfied himself in unsuccessfully rewriting the two of François Xavier and most obscure letters sent from China in 1712 and 1722. This research tries to list all the other capable personalities, living at this time, who could have been asked to edit this entry. The reason why the porcelain of Sèvres, at its apogee by then and object to a great and indisputable success under Louis XV, is not mentioned and will be discussed.

Alexandre Benois and Denis Diderot

The article is the first to consider the influence of the views of Denis Diderot (“Salons”) on the works of Alexandre Benois — as an art historian, first of all — on his “The History of painting of all times and peoples”. As a result of a comparative analysis of the texts by two authors, it was established that both Benois and Diderot paid the greatest attention to the works of J. B. S. Chardin, F. Boucher, C. (Sh. A.) Vanloo, J.-B. Greuze, J.Robert. It has also been established that Benois described the art of Chardin and Boucher practically in the words of Diderot. The source study analysis of Benois’s article “The Collection of Drawings by Stepan Yaremich”, as well as Benois’s “Art letters” of different years, made it possible to find out his own attitude to Busher. The source study analysis of Benois’s memoirs “My Memories” and the work of R. Muther “The History of Painting in the 19th Century” made it possible to find out the source of Benois’s negative assessment of narrative and edifying in the art of Dreams — precisely those qualities that Diderot especially appreciated in the works of this artist. Comparative analysis of the text of Benois’s article “On Narrative in Painting”, his work “History of Russian Painting in the 19th Century” with the text of “Salons” by Diderot made it possible to find out that Benois used at the beginning of his activity the Diderot’s method of an expanded description.

Looking In and Shouting Out: Gendered Perspectives on the Convent in Gouges, Diderot, and Théron

This article argues that the gendered differences present in eighteenth-century French convent literature are put forth by two interconnected factors: (1) the ways in which the author understands and critiques the structure and function of monastic confinement and (2) the mechanism that drives the text forward, namely voice, gaze, or embodiment. Close readings of Olympe de Gouges’s Le Couvent ou les voeux forcés and Denis Diderot’s La Religieuse serve to demonstrate that the authors’ critiques of the convent space are not only present in their plots, but also replicated in the very form of their writing. These Enlightenment texts are juxtaposed with a 2012 theatrical adaptation of Diderot’s La Religieuse staged by French playwright Anne Théron, allowing for an investigation of how the mechanism propelling the work develops or persists when the authorial voice is altered across time and gender.