Blindness and Enlightenment

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.