Blindness and Enlightenment: An Essay

Blindness and Enlightenment presents a reading and translation of Diderots 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 Encyclopdie, 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.