Blindness and Enlightenment: An Essay: With a new translation of Diderot's 'Letter on the Blind' and La Mothe Le Vayer's 'Of a Man Born Blind' [Paperback]

Blindness and Enlightenment presents a reading and a new translation of Diderot's Letter on the Blind. Diderot was the editor of the Encyclop?die, 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.

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.

List of Figures appearing in the EssayAcknowledgements Note on the References Prologue, or Operation EnlightenmentIntroduction: Optics and TacticsOne: Reading is Believing?Two: The Blind Leading the Blind Leading the Blind Leading the Blind Leading the Blind ...Three: Point of View and Point de VueFour: Groping Around in the LightFive: A Supplement to Saunderson's MemoirsSix: Dis/Solving Molyneux's ProblemConclusion, or Two Hours Later ...BibliographyIndexAppendicesI. Denis Diderot, The Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who Can See (1749)Note on the TranslationTranslationII. Fran?ois de La Mothe Le Vayer, Of a Man-Born-Blind' (1653)Note on the TranslationTranslation