‘Ah! Si vous pouviez lire au fond de mon coeur...’: Diderot et le mythe de l’intériorite´

Abstract

Following Locke, most eighteenth-century scholars conceive of the mind as a space filled with ideas which can be known by introspection. Diderot puts to the test this "myth of interiority" in Jacques le Fataliste, showing that self-knowledge, like knowledge of the external world, is based on imagination and speculation.