Intellectual setting
Diderot worked under the French monarchy's censorship regime, which suppressed or restricted the Encyclopédie multiple times during its publication, and his most radically materialist writings, such as "D'Alembert's Dream," circulated only privately or were published posthumously.
Key ideas
The Encyclopédie as an Enlightenment instrument
As chief editor, Diderot organized the Encyclopédie to cross-reference craft, science, and philosophy so that readers could trace connections across fields, treating the systematic diffusion of knowledge itself as a tool of intellectual and social emancipation.
Sensitive matter
In "D'Alembert's Dream," Diderot argued that sensitivity is a universal, if often dormant, property of matter, and that mind and life emerge from the organization of matter rather than requiring an immaterial substance distinct from body.
Legacy
The Encyclopédie became the central reference work of the European Enlightenment and a model for later encyclopedic projects, while Diderot's materialism anticipated later naturalistic accounts of mind and influenced Marx's and Engels's reading of Enlightenment materialism.