Letter on the Blind and the Outline of Diderot's Philosophy of Materialism

Diderot's way of writing and treating of the themes left a unique imprint in the history of philosophical thought. Letter on the Blind, one of the masterpieces of his work, reveals a specificity of his philosophical discourse: perspicacious, unseizable, defying limitations. On the ideological level it is identifiable as an "ontology of indeterminism" which blurs the boundaries between different categories of being and calls into question any 235 dogmatic views including materialism that seek to acquire a sense of world events. In difference to Holbach that derived a dogmatic position from atomistic combinatorics Diderot's philosophy of materialism does not insist on binding conceptual categories of order and necessity; the "vast ocean of matter" spontaneously generates abundance of new and unpredictable forms. Concepts of species and individuals are only artificial designations with which our thought draws a silhouette on the otherwise non-differentiated field of matter.