Keyword: David Skrbina

Denis Diderot (1713-1784) is best known as a co-editor, with Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, of the ‘Encyclopedie’ --a monument to rationalist, secularist, and humanist thought of the French Enlightenment. The central project in all his writing was to dispel supernatural and theistic superstitions and to ground all phenomena in naturalistic explanations. That this could lead to panpsychism is perhaps surprising. Like LaMattrie and Maupertuis before him, Diderot grappled with a fundamental problem:…