Philosophy
1694 to 1778, Paris, France
Reason against fanaticism, tolerance against persecution, and the laughter of Candide against every system that calls our suffering the best of all possible worlds.
Start learning Voltaire →Voltaire’s campaign against religious persecution - built from a real judicial murder, the Calas affair - and his argument that fanaticism is a disease of reason to be cured by tolerance, humanity, and the recogni…
Voltaire as the emblem of free thought and free expression - the case that the right to think and speak is the root of every other liberty, why he became its symbol, and the honest correction that his most famous &lsquo…
Voltaire’s deism - belief in a rational Creator known through nature and reason - set against the churches, their miracles, mysteries, and superstitions; the Philosophical Dictionary as a portable arsenal against…
Voltaire’s comic masterpiece as a demolition of Leibnizian optimism - the doctrine that this is ‘the best of all possible worlds’ - through the endless catastrophes of Candide and his tutor Pangloss, e…
Voltaire’s Letters concerning the English Nation - the book that used England as a mirror to shame France, praising its religious tolerance, its commerce, its liberty, and above all the empiricism of Locke and the…
More in Philosophy
AristotlePlatoImmanuel KantFriedrich NietzscheConfuciusSenecaEpictetusMarcus Aureliusepoché — a humanities education that remembers you.