The mirror is a worthless invention. It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road. It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.
All is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds, insists Pangloss. By the end of the book, however, Candide himself is not so sure — nor, most probably, are those now reading Voltaire for the first time. Voltaire on a Je suis Charlie poster. Photograph: Twitter.
Both Hume and Voltaire began with the same skepticism about rationalist philosophy, and each embraced the Newtonian criterion that made empirical fact the only guarantor of truth in philosophy.
His attachment was to the new Newtonian empirical scientists, and while he was never more than a dilettante scientist himself, his devotion to this form of natural inquiry made him in some respects the leading philosophical advocate and ideologist for the new empirico-scientific conception of philosophy that Newton initiated.
For Voltaire and many other eighteenth-century Newtonians the most important project was defending empirical science as an alternative to traditional natural philosophy. In particular, Voltaire fought vigorously against the rationalist epistemology that critics used to challenge Newtonian reasoning. His famous conclusion in Candide , for example, that optimism was a philosophical chimera produced when dialectical reason remains detached from brute empirical facts owed a great debt to his Newtonian convictions.
His alternative offered in the same text of a life devoted to simple tasks with clear, tangible, and most importantly useful ends was also derived from the utilitarian discourse that Newtonians also used to justify their science. In this respect, his philosophy as manifest in each was deeply indebted to the epistemological convictions he gleaned from Newtonianism. Voltaire also contributed directly to the new relationship between science and philosophy that the Newtonian revolution made central to Enlightenment modernity.
Especially important was his critique of metaphysics and his argument that it be eliminated from any well-ordered science. At the center of the Newtonian innovations in natural philosophy was the argument that questions of body per se were either irrelevant to, or distracting from, a well focused natural science. Against Leibniz, for example, who insisted that all physics begin with an accurate and comprehensive conception of the nature of bodies as such, Newton argued that the character of bodies was irrelevant to physics since this science should restrict itself to a quantified description of empirical effects only and resist the urge to speculate about that which cannot be seen or measured.
This removal of metaphysics from physics was central to the overall Newtonian stance toward science, but no one fought more vigorously for it, or did more to clarify the distinction and give it a public audience than Voltaire. It also accused Leibniz of becoming deluded by his zeal to make metaphysics the foundation of physics.
In this way, Voltaire should be seen as the initiator of a philosophical tradition that runs from him to Auguste Comte and Charles Darwin, and then on to Karl Popper and Richard Dawkins in the twentieth century. The result has been the production of three major collections of his writings including his vast correspondence, the last unfinished.
The scholarly literature on Voltaire is vast, and growing larger every day. The summary here, therefore, will be largely restricted to scholarly books, with only a few articles of singular import listed. Paris: Lefevre, — Moland and G. Fleming ed. Du Mont, Shorter Writings of Voltaire , J. Rodale ed. Barnes, Tallentyre tr.
Applegate ed. Ungar, Voltaire: Selected Writings , Christopher Thacker ed. Voltaire: Selections , Paul Edwards ed. Brumfitt ed. Pollack tr. Epistle of M. Voltaire to the King of Prussia , Glasgow, Swallow, Eckler, The Sermon of the Fifty , J. Paxton, London: Cass, Birmingham, AL: Gryphon Editions, Philosophical Dictionary Edited by Theodore Besterman. London: Penguin Books, Translated by Peter Gay. New York: Basic Books, Steiner ed.
Leonard Tancock ed. Ernest Dilworth ed. Nicholas Cronk ed. Taylor ed. Harvard Classics, Vol. Allen, Candide, or Optimism Hundreds of English editions of this text have been published, so this list is restricted to the most important scholarly editions published since Niven ed.
Candide and other Writings , Haskell M. Block ed. Richard Aldington, Ernest Dilworth, and others eds. Shane Weller ed. Robert Martin Adams ed. Norton, Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project, Candide and Related Texts , David Wooton ed. Lowell Bair ed.
Crocker ed. Raffael Burton ed. Theo Cuffe ed. Candide and other Stories , Roger Pearson ed. Secondary Literature The scholarly literature on Voltaire is vast, and growing larger every day.
Barber, W. Barrell, Rex A. Brooks, Richard A. Brumfitt, J. Collins, J. Conlon, Pierre M. Dickinson, H. Louis: Washington University Press. Ehrman, Esther, , Mme. Guerlac, Henry, , Newton on the Continent , Ithaca. Gurrado, Antonio, , Voltaire cattolico , Torino: Lindau.
Hagengruber, Ruth ed. Lanson, Gustave, , Voltaire , Paris: Hachette. Lilti, Antoine, , Le monde des salons. Mattei, Silvia, , Voltaire et les voyages de la raison , Paris: Harmattan. McMahon, Darrin M.
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