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Diderot, philosophie, matérialisme

Diderot, le matérialisme et la division de l’espèce humaine

Ann Thomson

Abstracts

Diderot, materialism and the divisions of the human species
This article tries to situate Diderot’s thought in relation to contemporary reflections on human varieties, in view of the fact that several of the founders of 19th-century physical anthropology, creators of systems classifying races, adopted a materialistic conception of the human being. We first summarize certain aspects of Diderot’s reflection on humans and their place in nature, in particular the type of determinism governing them, their place in the chain of beings and geographical variations in human types. He insists on the unity of nature and criticizes any attempt to classify beings, but, like other contemporaries, he is interested in the question of human varieties and repeats generalisations about the differences between ‘races’ ; in the article HUMAINE ESPÈCE, he even affirms the intellectual inequality of races. Diderot was fascinated by physiognomy and the theories of P. Camper, inventor of the ‘facial line’, adopted by physical anthropologists, but he used it to emphasize the continuity between species. What emerges is the difficulty he experiences in theorising human differences. His desire to create a materialistic anthropology leads him to emphasize the physical organisation on intellectual capacities, but this is countered by his refusal of classificatory systems, his conception of the chain of beings and his awareness of the instability of nature. His desire to proclaim political liberty and to found morality on similarities between humans prevented him from going down a path that later thinkers did not hesitate to follow.

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References

Electronic reference

Ann Thomson, “Diderot, le matérialisme et la division de l’espèce humaine”Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie [Online], 26 | avril 1999, Online since 04 August 2007, connection on 18 April 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rde/1191; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/rde.1191

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Ann Thomson

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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