Blindness and Enlightenment: An Essay

Kate E. Tunstall is University Lecturer in French at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Worcestor College. She is Programme Director of Oxford's Besterman Centre for the Enlightenment and is on the Board of Directors of the Oxford Amnesty Lectures. She has been a Visiting Lecturer at Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle and Kennedy Memorial Fellow at Harvard University. She is the editor of the forthcoming Self-Evident Truths?: Human Rights and the Enlightenment. She co-wrote and co-presented (with Caroline Warman) a series of BBC radio programmes on Diderot.

"Kate Tunstall's precise new translations of Denis Diderot's Lettre sur les aveugles and François de La Mothe Le Vayer's ‘D'un aveugle-né' are most welcome resources for the Enlightenment scholar and teacher. Her introductory essay will prove to be even more useful, as it elegantly situates one of the most peculiar yet important of Diderot's early epistemological reflections in the complex of Enlightenment intellectual, theological and medical concepts that furnished its meaning and urgency for Diderot's contemporaries. Under Kate Tunstall's erudite treatment, the allusions, the ironies, the seeming confusion and the politically unsayable resolve into remarkable clarity. Just as importantly, Tunstall's own exposition is elegantly witty and delightfully playful, so we not only comprehend intellectually why this most disconcerting of Diderotian performances was scandalous. In her stylistic evocation of Diderot's voice, Kate Tunstall provides her modern audience with a readerly experience closer to that of Diderot's contemporaries so that we feel as a result something too often lost in this pragmatic age: how much of Diderot's—or any major author's—message depends on a deeply literary culture. A work to be enjoyed on many levels, this book should be on every Enlightenment lover's bookshelf." -- Wilda Anderson, Professor of French, The John Hopkins University, USA

• List of Figures appearing in the Essay; Acknowledgements; Note on the References; Prologue, or Operation Enlightenment; Recognition Scenes; Misrecognition Scenes; Scene Unseen; Introduction: Optics and Tactics; ***, or the Letter-Writer Formerly Known as Diderot; Wider Focus and Closer Up; Blind Man's Buff; The Epigram; One: Reading is Believing?; The Man-Born-Blind of Puiseaux; Blind Men and Bonnets; Saunderson; Two: The Blind Leading the Blind Leading the Blind Leading the; Blind Leading the Blind...; Molyneux's Man-Born-Blind; A Comic Type; Sextus Empiricus's Man who Sees and Hears Nothing; Montaigne's Gentleman of a Good House, Born Blind; Descartes's Analogy; Gassendi's Man-Born-Blind; La Mothe Le Vayer's Man-Born-Blind; Three: Point of View and Point de Vue; Reflections and Refractions; Morally Blind. Blind Vanity; Optics and Phatics; Blind Metaphysics; See and Tell; Four: Groping Around in the Light; Imagination and Memory; Touch and Drawing; An English Geometer's Ingenious Expression; Staying in Touch; Felicitous Expressions; Five: A Supplement to Saunderson's Memoirs; An Omission; A Conversation of the Existence of God; An Epicurean Vision; Last Words; Six: Dis/Solving Molyneux's Problem; The Prussian's Girl-Born-Blind; A Painful Operation; Trained Eyes; Seeing the Light; It Depends; Conclusion, or Two Hours Later...; Bibliography; Index; Appendices; I. Denis Diderot, The Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who; Can See (1749); Note on the Translation; Translation; II. Francois de La Mothe Le Vayer, 'Of a Man-Born-Blind' (1653); Note on the Translation; Translation.