Intro to Humanism, Part 5: Enlightenment Precursors to Secular Humanism
The Encylopedists were a group of French philosophers who worked together to produce the Encyclopedie, the first encyclopedia, or who shared its principles. Denis Diderot planned the complete alphabetical treatment of human knowledge from a materialist, skeptical, and pro-democracy point of view so that if civilization were ever destroyed, people could read the Encyclopedie and learn how to reconstruct it. The Encyclopedists used materialism, the philosophy that holds that everything that exists is either matter or depends on matter, to counter religious superstition and the reactionary attitudes of the Catholic Church.
Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was the most prominent of the French Encyclopedists, as well as a prominent Philosophe (a movement which will be explained later). He attacked both atheism and Christianity in Pensees Philosophiques, which in turn was ordered to be burned by the Parliament of Paris. For attacking conventional morality, he was imprisoned for three months. His philosophical position changed over time from first theism, then Deism, then materialism and then a sort of pantheism. Described as the first great writer to belong wholly to modern democratic society, his political writings greatly influenced the French Revolution.
Another French Encylopedist, Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709-1751) was a materialist who believed that mental events are causally dependent on bodily events. His first writing on materialism, as well as a medical satire, caused such outrage that he fled to Holland. There he published L'homme machine in which he argued that states of the soul were materially dependent upon states of the body. In the book, he also introduced the idea that consciousness is only distinguishable from involuntary activities by the relative mechanical complexity that allows a system that is purposive, autonomous and dynamic. After the book was publicly burned, de la Mettrie sought protection from Frederick the Great in Berlin.
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was also an Encylopedist, but is better known as one of the Democrats, and will be discussed later.
Claude Adrien Helvetius (1715-1771) was a French philosopher who held the skeptical and materialistic views common to other Encyclopedists. His Essays on the Mind was regarded as a "godless book" and condemned by both the Pope and the Parliament in Paris. It was publicly burned in Paris, but also widely translated and read more than any other book of that time.
Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach, born Paul Heinrich Dietrich (1723-1789), was a German born Encyclopedist who inherited his uncle's estate and title
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