Blindness and Enlightenment: An Essay

This is a new reading and translation, the first into English since the eighteenth-century, of Diderot's "Letter on the Blind for Use by the Sighted". "Blindness and Enlightenment" presents a reading and translation of Diderot's "Letter on the Blind for Use by the Sighted" (the first translation into English since the eighteenth-century). Diderot was the founder and editor of the "Encyclopedie", a novelist, a philosopher and an active proponent of democratic ideals. His "Letter on the Blind" is essential reading for anyone interested in Enlightenment philosophy or eighteenth-century literature. By discussing the blind, Diderot undercuts a central assumption of the Enlightenment, present in the very term itself in its reference to 'light', namely that moral and philosophical insight was dependent on seeing.