The World in Time

Andrew S. Curran

Friday, April 19, 2019

Vincennes (Vignette), engraved by W. Miller, after Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1836. Photograph © Tate (CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

“Despite repeated allusions to the importance of posterity, Diderot has not made life easy for his biographers,” Andrew S. Curran writes at the beginning of his book Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. In this week’s podcast, the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University explains how he set about exploring the life of the French philosopher and editor of the Encyclopédie—and shows how the best way to start thinking about Denis Diderot is to split his seventy years on earth in two parts, his prison sentence in Vincennes serving as the point of bifurcation.

 

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Andrew S. Curran, author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely.

 

Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Discussed in this episode

More Podcasts

September 04, 2020

The World in Time:

Richard Kreitner

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union. More

Glass Beach in Fort Bragg, California, 2015. Photograph by Gustavo Gerdel.

April 16, 2021

The World in Time:

Nathaniel Rich

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade. More

September 29, 2017

The World in Time:

Peter Frankopan

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World More

The Populist Paul Revere, by J.S. Pughe, 1904.

August 14, 2020

The World in Time:

Thomas Frank

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The People, No. More

September 09, 2022

The World in Time:

Kermit Roosevelt III

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story. More

September 15, 2011

The World in Time:

Green Mountain Boy

Willard Sterne Randall and Lewis Lapham talk about the life and adventures of Ethan Allen.  More