Joanna Stalnaker, “Diderot’s Brain”

The Long Eighteenth Century Transatlantic Studies Group (a Rutgers English working group) is proud to present a guest lecture:

Abstract: At the end of his life, Diderot was working on a decades-old project that has been called his second encyclopedia. This was the Elements of Physiology, a work he intended as nothing less than a compendium of all existing knowledge on the operations of the human body. My paper will interpret this work as a philosophical testament in which Diderot grapples with what happens to a human mind when a person dies, and with how to understand the end of a philosophical life. I will suggest that he expressed his answers to these questions not just in the philosophical ideas laid out in the work, but also in the experimental form he gave to it.

Joanna Stalnaker teaches in the Department of French at Columbia University. She is the author of The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia and is now writing a book about the last works of the Enlightenment philosophes Buffon, Diderot, Rousseau and Voltaire.

For more information, please contact Alex Solomon, co-organizer of the Long Eighteenth Century Transatlantic Studies Group, at [email protected]