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Because of his public leadership of the philosophe party in eighteenth-century France, Voltaire stands today as the iconic example of the French Enlightenment philosopher. Denis Diderot (1713–1784) is often seen as Voltaire's second in that role since it was around both men that the Enlightenment philosophes rallied as a movement after 1750. The epochal project, which Diderot jointly pursued with Jean le Rond D'Alembert, to "change the common way of thinking" through a comprehensive Encyclopedia, or Reasoned Dictionary of the Arts, Sciences, and Trades provided the emergent philosophe movement with the cause around which they would coalesce. Diderot also fought vigorously with Voltaire on behalf of the Encyclopédie project and its principles, becoming as a result a public leader of the Enlightenment philosophical party in France alongside Voltaire. He also worked, like Voltaire, as a writer and critical intellectual who willingly positioned himself against the grain of established authority, and one who used philosophy as a vehicle for political and social activism. Yet Diderot's philosophy pursued many more agendas and dimensions than Voltaire's. He also left behind a corpus of philosophical writings that marks him out as arguably the most sophisticated of all the Enlightenment philosophes, and as one of the great philosophical thinkers of the eighteenth-century. Despite the obvious sophistication of Diderot's philosophy, his legacy has suffered because of the historical differences separating his writings from the discipline of philosophy as it is practiced today. Enlightenment philosophie was something very different from what professional academic philosophers mean by that term today, and Diderot's writings are often ignored by modern philosophers because they do not appear to be philosophy as they know it. Like many Enlightenment philosophes, Diderot also worked as an homme de lettres first and foremost, and only as a philosopher narrowly construed in certain instances. He also never authored any recognizable work of "systematic philosophy" if by that term we mean writing in the vein of his contemporaries such as David Hume in his Treatise or Immanuel Kant in his Critiques. Yet Diderot made important contributions to modern philosophy, and if they are to be grasped, the historical differences separating his writing from philosophy today must be transcended, and his eclectic manner of working accepted and embraced. Diderot wrote works that we recognize today as philosophy, but he also wrote a great deal more than that, and the challenge presented by his eighteenth-century philosophie is to see the modern philosophy contained in all of it. For Diderot did not simply write plays, art criticism, prose fictions, and highly imaginative works of literature alongside his work in philosophy; he pursued philosophie through these ostensibly literary works as well. He experimented with genres, including philosophical genres, when crafting his thought, and his writing overall is redolent with a self-consciousness that makes any easy separation of his explicitly philosophical writings from his literary work well-nigh impossible. His publishing habits were similarly complex, for as a writer who suffered personally under censorship that made the traffic in illicit ideas a prosecutable offense in Old Regime France, Diderot often had very good reason to leave his work unpublished—and very often did. At the same time, censorship alone does not explain the peculiar mix of published and unpublished writings found in Diderot's oeuvre. This historical complexity has given rise to some difficulty in assessing Diderot's writings according to the disciplinary canon of modern philosophy. Condillac, Helvétius, and d'Holbach are the Enlightenment philosophes most commonly studied within philosophy departments because their writings appear to conform better with conventional understandings of what philosophy should look like as a genre and a linguistic idiom. By contrast, the works of Diderot tend to be studied only in literature or history departments. This is unfortunate, for the treatment of Diderot's philosophie as something different from modern philosophy has cut contemporary philosophers off from the work of one of the most sophisticated, subtle, and complex philosophical thinkers of the eighteenth century. To some extent, the way in which Diderot's philosophical work employs different genres but also, challenges the idea of genre itself, has made it seem (perhaps too easily) congenial to a more "Continental" philosophical tradition, and foreign to a more formally oriented "analytic" tradition. But that would ignore Diderot's naturalistic commitments and the role the Encyclopédie played, e.g., in the self-image of philosophers of science in the Vienna Circle. Our entry seeks to go beyond such oppositions in dealing with Diderot as a philosopher. Neither perspective alone fully grasps the richness of Diderot's contributions to modern philosophy, so in order to fully situate his philosophie within philosophy writ large, a flexible and reflexive attitude regarding his writings must be adopted. Every text in Diderot's oeuvre needs to be treated as a participant in both his philosophie and his philosophical work, and our conventional understanding of the boundaries isolating art and literature from science and philosophy also needs to be suspended because very often these modern distinctions do not apply in Diderot's case. He also manifests an awareness of the new and emergent disciplinary taxonomy arising at the time, targeting his philosophie on many occasions at an interrogation of these developing epistemological divisions. This reflexivity often makes his thought even more relevant today than it was when it was written. To capture the complexity of Diderot's philosophie as philosophy, this article adopts this reflexive approach. It will proceed in two parts. An overview of Diderot's life and major texts is offered in Part I so as to present his work and writings as particular episodes in a coherent eighteenth-century life and career. To simplify the reading of this biography, the text is offered in a two-level presentation. A short overview of the highlights of Diderot's life and work is offered in Section 1 to give readers a schematic overview, but a more extensive presentation of his biography is available in the Biographical Supplement. A comprehensive analysis of Diderot's major philosophical preoccupations as revealed in his writings is then offered in Section 2 so as to outline the contours of Diderot's place within Enlightenment philosophie and modern philosophy overall. This is followed by brief concluding remarks in Section 3.

International audience ; The brain in its plasticity and inherent 'sociality' can be proclaimed and projected as a revolutionary organ. Far from the old reactions which opposed the authenticity of political theory and praxis to the dangerous naturalism of 'cognitive science' (with images of men in white coats, the RAND Corporation or military LSD experiments), recent decades have shown us some of the potentiality of the social brain (Vygotsky, and more recently Negri 1995 and Negri 2000, Virno 2001). Is the brain somehow inherently a utopian topos? If in some earlier papers I sought to defend naturalism against these reactions, here I consider a new challenge: the recently emerged disciplines of neuronormativity, which seek in their own way to overcome the nature-normativity divide. This is the task of a materialist brain theory today. 1. The setup: horns of a dilemma There is a lingering zone of what one might think of as sore cognitive muscle tissue in the area of materialism. It is an area of both contested territory and in some cases, a kind of pathos of distance of the 'Ugh! Keep that thing away from me!' sort. I have in mind the combination of materialism as an emancipatory socio-political project (which need not be construed in strictly Marx-Engels terms, if we think of Lucretius et al.) and as a cold-hearted 'spontaneous philosophy of the men in white coats', e.g. nefarious neurophilosophers. Faced with this rather massive alternative, this choice between two projects, I have stubbornly been saying since some discussions with Negri in the late 90s

International audience ; The brain in its plasticity and inherent 'sociality' can be proclaimed and projected as a revolutionary organ. Far from the old reactions which opposed the authenticity of political theory and praxis to the dangerous naturalism of 'cognitive science' (with images of men in white coats, the RAND Corporation or military LSD experiments), recent decades have shown us some of the potentiality of the social brain (Vygotsky, and more recently Negri 1995 and Negri 2000, Virno 2001). Is the brain somehow inherently a utopian topos? If in some earlier papers I sought to defend naturalism against these reactions, here I consider a new challenge: the recently emerged disciplines of neuronormativity, which seek in their own way to overcome the nature-normativity divide. This is the task of a materialist brain theory today. 1. The setup: horns of a dilemma There is a lingering zone of what one might think of as sore cognitive muscle tissue in the area of materialism. It is an area of both contested territory and in some cases, a kind of pathos of distance of the 'Ugh! Keep that thing away from me!' sort. I have in mind the combination of materialism as an emancipatory socio-political project (which need not be construed in strictly Marx-Engels terms, if we think of Lucretius et al.) and as a cold-hearted 'spontaneous philosophy of the men in white coats', e.g. nefarious neurophilosophers. Faced with this rather massive alternative, this choice between two projects, I have stubbornly been saying since some discussions with Negri in the late 90s

The sciences of cognition, going back to the early days of the Artificial Intelligence movement in the 1950s, were typically viewed with profound suspicion or distaste by thinkers, Marxist and other, for whom the embeddedness of human beings in the symbolic realm of representations and values was a sine qua non condition of any legitimate theory - whether ethical, political, metaphysical. Attempts to locate mind and action within the natural world studied by the natural sciences, in this case by neuroscience, were viewed as at best conceptual justifications for de-humanizing, secret military projects. The fact that in recent years the sciences of cognition have had a 'social turn' ("social cognition", "social neuroscience," "affective neuroscience", "collective intentionality" and so forth) does little to assuage the fears of the engagé, anti-naturalist thinker. In contrast, I propose a historic-philosophical reconstruction of a 'Spinozist' tradition which locates the brain within the broader network of relations, including social relations. This tradition runs from Spinoza to Marx and Lev Vygotski in the early 20th century, and on to Toni Negri and Paolo Virno in recent European philosophy, as a new perspective on the brain. The concept of social brain that is articulated in this reconstruction - some early-20th century Soviet neuropsychologists spoke of the "socialist cortex" - overcomes distinctions between Continental thought and the philosophy of mind (and its ancillary, cognitive science), and possibly gives a new metaphysical framework for social cognition.

Prior to publishing (with Michael Hardt) his political treatise entitled Empire (2000), followed by its sequels, which are actually more like 'complements', Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth (2009), Antonio Negri had elaborated what we might call an ontology, a theory of what there is, or in his case, of 'the real', in works on Spinoza, Marx, the concept of 'constituent power' (pouvoir constituant) and most recently, kairos. And as it turns out, not only does the ontology we encounter in these works underpin the empirical reflections on Empire, but less traditionally (that is, in a sense distinct from the usual relation between theory and practice), the idea of ontology itself becomes political. This paper tries to bring to light this dimension of Negri's thought – the hidden connections between the metaphysics of a 17th century Dutch philosopher and the potentially emancipatory mechanisms of globalisation.

International audience ; The concept of 'social brain' is a hybrid, located somewhere in between politically motivated philosophical speculation about the mind and its place in the social world, and recently emerged inquiries into cognition, selfhood, development, etc., returning to some of the founding insights of social psychology but embedding them in a neuroscientific framework. In this paper I try to reconstruct a philosophical tradition for the social brain, a 'Spinozist' tradition which locates the brain within the broader network of relations, including social relations. This tradition runs from Spinoza to Lev Vygotsky in the early 20th century, and on to Gilles Deleuze, Toni Negri and Paolo Virno in recent European philosophy, as a new perspective on the brain. The concept of social brain that is articulated in this reconstruction – some early-20th century Soviet neuropsychologists spoke of socialism and the cortex as being "on the same path" – overcomes distinctions between Continental thought and the philosophy of mind, and possibly gives a new metaphysical framework for social cognition.

International audience ; The concept of 'social brain' is a hybrid, located somewhere in between politically motivated philosophical speculation about the mind and its place in the social world, and recently emerged inquiries into cognition, selfhood, development, etc., returning to some of the founding insights of social psychology but embedding them in a neuroscientific framework. In this paper I try to reconstruct a philosophical tradition for the social brain, a 'Spinozist' tradition which locates the brain within the broader network of relations, including social relations. This tradition runs from Spinoza to Lev Vygotsky in the early 20th century, and on to Gilles Deleuze, Toni Negri and Paolo Virno in recent European philosophy, as a new perspective on the brain. The concept of social brain that is articulated in this reconstruction – some early-20th century Soviet neuropsychologists spoke of socialism and the cortex as being "on the same path" – overcomes distinctions between Continental thought and the philosophy of mind, and possibly gives a new metaphysical framework for social cognition.

International audience ; The sciences of cognition, going back to the early days of the Artificial Intelligence movement in the 1950s, were typically viewed with profound suspicion or distaste by thinkers, Marxist and other, for whom the embeddedness of human beings in the symbolic realm of representations and values was a sine qua non condition of any legitimate theory – whether ethical, political, metaphysical. Attempts to locate mind and action within the natural world studied by the natural sciences, in this case by neuroscience, were viewed as at best conceptual justifications for de-humanizing, secret military projects. The fact that in recent years the sciences of cognition have had a 'social turn' (" social cognition, " " social neuroscience, " " affective neuroscience, " " collective intentionality " and so forth) does little to assuage the fears of the engagé, anti-naturalist thinker. In contrast, I propose a historic-philosophical reconstruction of a 'Spinozist' tradition which locates the brain within the broader network of relations, including social relations. This tradition runs from Spinoza to Marx and Lev Vygotski in the early 20 th century, and on to Toni Negri and Paolo Virno in recent European philosophy, as a new perspective on the brain. The concept of social brain that is articulated in this reconstruction – some early-20 th century Soviet neuropsychologists spoke of the " socialist cortex " – overcomes distinctions between Continental thought and the philosophy of mind (and its ancillary, cognitive science), and possibly gives a new metaphysical framework for social cognition.

International audience ; The sciences of cognition, going back to the early days of the Artificial Intelligence movement in the 1950s, were typically viewed with profound suspicion or distaste by thinkers, Marxist and other, for whom the embeddedness of human beings in the symbolic realm of representations and values was a sine qua non condition of any legitimate theory – whether ethical, political, metaphysical. Attempts to locate mind and action within the natural world studied by the natural sciences, in this case by neuroscience, were viewed as at best conceptual justifications for de-humanizing, secret military projects. The fact that in recent years the sciences of cognition have had a 'social turn' (" social cognition, " " social neuroscience, " " affective neuroscience, " " collective intentionality " and so forth) does little to assuage the fears of the engagé, anti-naturalist thinker. In contrast, I propose a historic-philosophical reconstruction of a 'Spinozist' tradition which locates the brain within the broader network of relations, including social relations. This tradition runs from Spinoza to Marx and Lev Vygotski in the early 20 th century, and on to Toni Negri and Paolo Virno in recent European philosophy, as a new perspective on the brain. The concept of social brain that is articulated in this reconstruction – some early-20 th century Soviet neuropsychologists spoke of the " socialist cortex " – overcomes distinctions between Continental thought and the philosophy of mind (and its ancillary, cognitive science), and possibly gives a new metaphysical framework for social cognition.

In his Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty (1717), the English deist Anthony Collins proposed a complete determinist account of the human mind and action, partly inspired by his mentor Locke, but also by elements from Bayle, Leibniz and other Continental sources. It is a determinism which does not neglect the question of the specific status of the mind but rather seeks to provide a causal account of mental activity and volition in particular; it is a 'volitional determinism'. Some decades later, Diderot articulates a very similar determinism, which seeks to recognize the existence of "causes proper to man" (as he says in the Réfutation d'Helvétius). The difference with Collins is that now biological factors are being taken into account. Obviously both the 'volitional' and the 'biological' forms of determinism are noteworthy inasmuch as they change our picture of the nature of determinism itself, but my interest here is to compare these two determinist arguments, both of which are broadly Spinozist in nature – and as such belong to what Jonathan Israel called in his recent book "the radical Enlightenment," i.e. a kind of underground Enlightenment constituted by Spinozism – and to see how Collins' specifically psychological vision and Diderot's specifically biological vision correspond to their two separate national contexts: determinism in France in the mid-1750s was a much more medico-biological affair than English determinism, which appears to be on a 'path' leading to Mill and associationist psychology. This case study should then shed some light on the intellectual and ideological (religious, political) 'boundaries' delimiting radical thought in two European countries in the first half of the eighteenth century.

How do you create inviting and authentic urban environments where people feel at home? Countless community engagement workshops, studies by consulting firms, and downtown revitalization campaigns have attempted to answer this age-old question. 0In 'Urbanism Without Effort', Chuck Wolfe argues that "unplanned" places can often teach us more about great placemaking than planned ones. From impromptu movie nights in a Seattle alley to the adapted reuse of Diocletian's Palace in Split, Croatia, Wolfe searches for the "first principles" of what makes humans feel happy and safe amid the hustle and bustle of urban life. He highlights the common elements of cities around the world that spontaneously bring people together: being inherently walkable, factors that contribute to safety at night, the importance of intersections and corners, and more. In this age of skyrocketing metropolitan growth, he argues, looking to the past might be our best approach to creating the urban future we dream about. 0A whirlwind global tour, 'Urbanism Without Effort' offers readers inspiration, historical context, and a better understanding of how an inviting urban environment is created