Diderot and the Metamorphosis of Species

Mary Gregory is a scholar of the French Enlightenment. For the past ten years she has been researching Diderot’s views regarding the metamorphosis of species in four of his texts, namely, the Pensées philosophiques (1746), the Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient (1749), the Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature (1753), and the trilogy, the Entretien entre d’Alembert et Diderot (1769), the Rêve de d’Alembert (1769), and the Suite de l’Entretien (1769).

• Introduction; Chapter One Chaos, Flux, Time, and Probability; Chapter Two Embryology, Epigenesis, and the Metamorphosis of Species; Chapter Three Spontaneous Generation; Chapter Four The Chain of Beings; Chapter Five The Mutability of Species; Chapter Six The Ascent of Consciousness; Conclusion;