Diderot's Chaotic Order: Approach to Synthesis

Because of its fragmentary, evolving, exploratory, and dialectical character, Diderot's thought has continuously resisted overall synthesis. In the ideas of "order" and "disorder," ideas important in all of eighteenth-century thought, Lester G. Crocker finds the key to an outline of a structure that leads to a genuine synthesis of Diderot's writings on philosophy, morality, politics, and aesthetics.

The tensions in Diderot's thought, Professor Crocker shows, reflect his understanding of real...