Daily Dialectic

Progressive philosophy during the French Enlightenment was marked by a rejection of innate ideas and by the Lockean maxim that all knowledge is in the first instance attained by use of the senses. As the period’s radical philosophy increasingly trended towards materialism this led to the heightened significance of corporeality for philosophy and to a series of sustained philosophical meditations on the nature of embodiment, sensation, and on the relation between sense and reflection. In this extremely brief and hastily constructed presentation I will introduce one of the period’s most interesting reflections on the problem and nature of sensation for knowledge, Denis Diderot’s 1749 ‘Letter on the blind for the use of those who see.’