Blindness and Enlightenment: An Essay

With a new translation of Diderot's 'Letter on the Blind' and La Mothe Le Vayer's 'Of a Man Born Blind'

Häftad, Engelska, 2011

AvKate E. Tunstall

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This is a new reading and translation, the first into English since the eighteenth-century, of Diderot's "Letter on the Blind for Use by the Sighted". "Blindness and Enlightenment" presents a reading and translation of Diderot's "Letter on the Blind for Use by the Sighted" (the first translation into English since the eighteenth-century). Diderot was the founder and editor of the "Encyclopedie", a novelist, a philosopher and an active proponent of democratic ideals. His "Letter on the Blind" is essential reading for anyone interested in Enlightenment philosophy or eighteenth-century literature. By discussing the blind, Diderot undercuts a central assumption of the Enlightenment, present in the very term itself in its reference to 'light', namely that moral and philosophical insight was dependent on seeing.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2011-08-18
Mått138 x 216 x 14 mm
Vikt314 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor256
FörlagContinuum Publishing Corporation
ISBN9781441119322

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Kate E. Tunstall is University Lecturer in French at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Worcestor College. She is Programme Director of Oxford's Besterman Centre for the Enlightenment and is on the Board of Directors of the Oxford Amnesty Lectures. She has been a Visiting Lecturer at Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle and Kennedy Memorial Fellow at Harvard University. She is the editor of the forthcoming Self-Evident Truths?: Human Rights and the Enlightenment. She co-wrote and co-presented (with Caroline Warman) a series of BBC radio programmes on Diderot.

List of Figures appearing in the Essay; Acknowledgements; Note on the References; Prologue, or Operation Enlightenment; Recognition Scenes; Misrecognition Scenes; Scene Unseen; Introduction: Optics and Tactics; ***, or the Letter-Writer Formerly Known as Diderot; Wider Focus and Closer Up; Blind Man's Buff; The Epigram; One: Reading is Believing?; The Man-Born-Blind of Puiseaux; Blind Men and Bonnets; Saunderson; Two: The Blind Leading the Blind Leading the Blind Leading the Blind Leading the Blind...; Molyneux's Man-Born-Blind; A Comic Type; Sextus Empiricus's Man who Sees and Hears Nothing; Montaigne's Gentleman of a Good House, Born Blind; Descartes's Analogy; Gassendi's Man-Born-Blind; La Mothe Le Vayer's Man-Born-Blind; Three: Point of View and Point de Vue; Reflections and Refractions; Morally Blind. Blind Vanity; Optics and Phatics; Blind Metaphysics; See and Tell; Four: Grouping Around in the Light; Imagination and Memory; Touch and Drawing; An English Geometer's Ingenious Expression; Staying in Touch; Felicitous Expressions; Five: A Supplement to Saunderson's Memoirs; An Omission; A Conversation of the Existence of God; An Epicurean Vision; Last Words; Six: Dis/Solving Molyneux's Problem; The Prussian's Girl-Born-Blind; A Painful Operation; Trained Eyes; Seeing the Light; It Depends; Conclusion, or Two Hours Later...; Bibliography; Index; Appendices; I. Denis Diderot, The Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who Can See (1749); Note on the Translation; Translation; II. Francois de La Mothe Le Vayer, 'Of a Man-Born-Blind' (1653); Note on the Translation; Translation.

"Diderot's study of cognitive deprivation as a way of understanding cognition itself is one of the most innovative moves in a century of intellectual innovation. Kate Tunstall's brilliant new translation and edition, accompanied by a lucid, witty and incisive essay that initiates the reader admirably into the complex problems raised by the Letter, will be a major resource for anyone wishing to understand core issues in the Enlightenment." - Terence Cave, Emeritus Research Fellow, St John's College, University of Oxford, UK