French Fiction, Literary Styles & Movements - Fiction

Jacques the Fatalist

Name: Jacques the Fatalist
Author: Denis Diderot
ISBN: 9780199537952

by Denis Diderot, David Coward

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Overview

Jacques the Fatalist is a provocative exploration of the problems of human existence, destiny, and free will. In the introduction to this brilliant translation, David Coward explains the philosophical basis of Diderot's fascination with fate and examines the experimental and influential literary techniques that make Jacques the Fatalist a classic of the Enlightenment.

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Synopsis

Jacques the Fatalist is a provocative exploration of the problems of human existence, destiny, and free will. In the introduction to this brilliant translation, David Coward explains the philosophical basis of Diderot's fascination with fate and examines the experimental and influential literary techniques that make Jacques the Fatalist a classic of the Enlightenment.

About the Author, Denis Diderot

Denis Diderot (1713 – 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic and writer. Born at Langres and was schooled by Jesuits. He attended the University of Paris where he led a bohemian life, making a living doing odd jobs: tutorships, freelance writing, bookseller, and translator.
He supported John Locke's theory of knowledge in his Lettres sur les aveugles (1749), a work hostile to entrenched and conventional morality; for that intellectual attack he was imprisoned at Vincennes for three months.
A polymath with expertise in several fields, and much immersed in science and the scientific trends of his day, he was particularly qualified to take on the immense task of compiling an encyclopedia. Today we remember Diderot mostly as the co-founder and editor of the Encyclopédie, the foremost encyclopedia to be published as the French Revolution was taking place.
Among his good friends he included Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Claude Adrien Helvétius, Abbé Raynal, and Lawrence Sterne.
During revolutionary times, Diderot was not able to make much of a living off his work on the Encyclopédie. Through the intervention of friends, Catherine of Russia bought his library, providing him also with a salary and use of the library for life.
He died of emphysema in Paris in 1784.