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Blindness and enlightenment : an essay

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  • Author: Tunstall, Kate E.
    Date:
    Created
    2013
    Summary:

    Blindness and Enlightenment presents a reading and a new translation of Diderot Letter on the Blind. Diderot was the editor of theEncyclopedie, that Trojan horse of Enlightenment ideas, as well as a novelist, playwright, art critic and philosopher. His Letter on the Blindof 1749 is essential reading for anyone interested in Enlightenment philosophy or eighteenth-century literature because it contradicts a central assumption of Western literature and philosophy, and of the Enlightenment in particular, namely that moral and philosophical insight is dependent on seeing. Kate Tunstall's essay guides the reader through the Letter, its anecdotes, ideas and its conversational mode of presenting them, and it situates the Letter in relation both to the Encyclopedie and to a rich tradition of writing about and, most importantly, talking and listening to the blind.

    Contents:

    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: Grouping 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.

    Genre:
    Essays, History and geography, Social science
    Subject(s): Blind | Blindness | Education | Eighteenth century | Enlightenment | People with visual disabilities
    Original Publisher: New York, Continuum
    Language(s): English