Overview

Blindness and Enlightenment presents a reading and a new translation of Diderot's Letter on the Blind. Diderot was the editor of the Encyclopédie, that Trojan horse of Enlightenment ideas, as well as a novelist, playwright, art critic and philosopher. His Letter on the Blind of 1749 is essential reading for anyone interested in Enlightenment philosophy or eighteenth-century literature because it contradicts a central assumption of Western literature and philosophy, and of the Enlightenment in particular, namely that moral and philosophical insight is dependent on seeing. Kate Tunstall's essay guides the reader through the Letter, its anecdotes, ideas and its conversational mode of presenting them, and it situates the Letter in relation both to the Encyclopedie and to a rich tradition of writing about and, most importantly, talking and listening to the blind.

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9781441119322

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Reviews

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

Diderot's Lettre sur les aveugles is one of the strangest and most powerful texts of the Enlightenment, an apparently rambling and jokey discussion of an abstruse philosophical problem, which culminates in a disturbing vision of a godless universe. Kate Tunstall's highly original and beautifully-written analysis is an outstanding treatment of its complexities, ironies, and anomalies, offering a much enriched understanding of the context in which it was produced and of its complex relations with a host of philosophical and literary texts. Michael Moriarty, Professor of French Literature and Thought, Queen Mary, University of London, UK

Author Information

Kate E. Tunstall is University Lecturer in French at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Worcester College. She is Programme Director of Oxford's Besterman Centre for the Enlightenment, a Director of the Oxford Amnesty Lectures, and she co-authored and co-presented (with Caroline Warman) a series of BBC radio programmes on Diderot.

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