![]() Voltaire’s Life: The Philosopher as Critic and Public Activist Second, a survey of Voltaire’s philosophical views is offered so as to attach the legacy of what Voltaire did with the intellectual viewpoints that his activities reinforced.ġ. First, a full account of Voltaire’s life is offered, not merely as background context for his philosophical work, but as an argument about the way that his particular career produced his particular contributions to European philosophy. To capture Voltaire’s unconventional place in the history of philosophy, this article will be structured in a particular way. In clarifying this new distinction between science and philosophy, and especially in fighting vigorously for it in public campaigns directed against the perceived enemies of fanaticism and superstition, Voltaire pointed modern philosophy down several paths that it subsequently followed. He was, however, a vigorous defender of a conception of natural science that served in his mind as the antidote to vain and fruitless philosophical investigation. ![]() He wrote as many plays, stories, and poems as patently philosophical tracts, and he in fact directed many of his critical writings against the philosophical pretensions of recognized philosophers such as Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes. Yet in other ways Voltaire was not a philosopher at all in the modern sense of the term. At the center of his work was a new conception of philosophy and the philosopher that in several crucial respects influenced the modern concept of each. ![]() François-Marie d’Arouet (1694–1778), better known by his pen name Voltaire, was a French writer and public activist who played a singular role in defining the eighteenth-century movement called the Enlightenment. ![]()
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