Molyneux's question : vision, touch, and the philosophy of perception / Michael J. Morgan.

  • Morgan, Michael J.
Date:
1977
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Molyneux's question : vision, touch, and the philosophy of perception / Michael J. Morgan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    MOLYNEUX'S QUESTION D'Alembert described it in the 'Discours préliminaire' of the Encyclopédie], it was left to Diderot to take the first real steps in that direction. He was born in 1713, the eldest son of an artisan of Langres, in the province of Champagne. At the age of fifteen he left the Jesuit College of Langres for Paris and in 1732 obtained the degree of Master of Arts from the University of Paris.^ Little is known about his rather hand-to-mouth bohemian existence of the next ten years, except that he became friendly with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who later introduced him to Condillac), and became married against his father's wishes to Antoinette Champion, who was helping her mother to run a linen business. Several of his letters to Antoinette survive; he calls her Tonton', or 'Ninot', and often his 'chère maman'.^ There is no reason to think that Antoinette was particularly bright, but equally no reason to think that this was the reason why the marriage did not turn out particularly well. True, Rousseau called Antoinette 'a shrew and a fish-wife',^ but a more generous assessment from a different source is that she 'lacked neither common sense nor good taste'. Whatever she was like, it can have been no joke being married to a man who worked on the Encylopédie for a period of twenty consecutive years with scarcely any rest, and who even in the early days of their marriage seems to have spent most of his time either with his intellectual cronies or with his lover Mme de Puisieux, the barrister's wife to whom Diderot is supposed to have addressed the Letter on the Blind. Meetings took place round about 1740 between Diderot, Rousseau and Condillac, in the Hôtel du Panier Fleuri in the Palais Royal. Of course, later on Jean-Jacques betrayed Diderot and then got in a paranoid state about it, as he did with all his friends. The relations between Diderot and Condillac seem to have been free of any such major upheaval. Relations with Vol¬ taire were excellent also, and they exchanged a very amicable correspondence about the Letter on the Blind ; but unfortunately ^ L. G. Crocker, The Embattled Philosopher. A Biography of Denis Diderot (London: Spearman, 1955] 6—9. 2 Denis Diderot: Correspondance, ed. George Roth, 16 vols. (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1955) I. 27; cf. also T. Besterman, Voltaire (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969) 56. ^ E. Herriot, 'Denis Diderot' in French Thought in the Eighteenth Century, ed. R. Rolland, A. Maurois and E. Herriot (London: Cassell, 1953) 251. 26