Warman Caroline. The Atheist's Bible: Diderot's 'Éléments de physiologie

Open Book Publishers, 2020. — 436 p. — ISBN 9781783748976.The Atheist’s Bible challenges prevailing scholarly views on Diderot’s Éléments, asserting its contemporary philosophical importance, and prompting its readers to inspect more closely this little-known and little-studied work. In this timely volume, Warman establishes the place of Diderot’s Éléments in the trajectory of materialist theories of nature and the mind stretching back to Epicurus and Lucretius, and explores the fascinating reasons behind scholarly neglect of this seminal work. In turn, Warman outlines the hitherto unacknowledged dissemination and reception of Diderot’s Éléments, demonstrating how Diderot’s Éléments was circulated in manuscript-form as early as the 1790s, thus showing how the text came to influence the next generations of materialist thinkers. This book is accompanied by a digital edition of Jacques-André Naigeon’s Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot (1823), a work which, Warman argues, represents the first publication of Diderot’s Éléments, long before its official publication date of 1875. The Atheist’s Bible constitutes a major contribution to the field of Diderot studies, and will be of further interest to scholars and students of materialist natural philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment and beyond.Introduction: The Curious Materialist
‘Toutes les imperfections de l’inachèvement’: The Mystification about the Manuscript Fragments
Material World and Embodied Mind
Diderot the Physiologist
1790: Naigeon and the Adresse à l’Assemblée nationale
1792: Naigeon’s Article on ‘Diderot’ in the Encyclopédie méthodique: Philosophie ancienne et moderne
1794: ‘Le citoyen Garron’, the Comité d’instruction publique, and the Lost Manuscript of the Éléments de physiologie
1794–95: Garat and the École normale
1796–97: Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy at the Institut national
1798, 1802: Naigeon, the OEuvres de Diderot, and the Censored Preface to Montaigne
1820: Garat’s Mémoires historiques sur la vie de M. Suard, sur ses écrits, et sur le XVIIIe siècle
1823: Naigeon’s Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot