Blindness and Enlightenment: An Essay: With a New Translation of Diderot's 'Letter on the Blind' and La Mothe Le Vayer's 'Of a Man Born Blind'

"Diderot's Lettre sur les aveugles is one of the strangest and most powerful texts of the Enlightenment, an apparently rambling and jokey discussion of an abstruse philosophical problem, which culminates in a disturbing vision of a godless universe. Kate Tunstall's highly original and beautifully-written analysis is an outstanding treatment of its complexities, ironies, and anomalies, offering a much enriched understanding of the context in which it was produced and of its complex relations with a host of philosophical and literary texts." Michael Moriarty, Professor of French Literature and Thought, Queen Mary, University of London, UK