Diderot and the Metamorphosis of Species

by Mary Gregory

Overview

In this study Dr. Gregory examines how Diderot borrowed from Lucretius, Buffon, Maupertuis, and probability theory, and combined ideas from these sources in an innovative fashion to hypothesize that species are mutable and that all life arose randomly from a single prototype.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781135915827
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	10/23/2006
Series:	Studies in Philosophy
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	422 KB

About the Author

Mary Gregory is a scholar of the French Enlightenment. For the past ten years she has been researching Diderot’s views regarding the metamorphosis of species in four of his texts, namely, the Pensées philosophiques (1746), the Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient (1749), the Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature (1753), and the trilogy, the Entretien entre d’Alembert et Diderot (1769), the Rêve de d’Alembert (1769), and the Suite de l’Entretien (1769).

Table of Contents

Introduction; Chapter One Chaos, Flux, Time, and Probability; Chapter Two Embryology, Epigenesis, and the Metamorphosis of Species; Chapter Three Spontaneous Generation; Chapter Four The Chain of Beings; Chapter Five The Mutability of Species; Chapter Six The Ascent of Consciousness; Conclusion;