Voltaire

1694-1778 · French · Enlightenment philosophy, deism, toleration, historiography

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

He was born François-Marie Arouet, took a name nobody has satisfactorily explained, and spent eighty-three years making himself the most famous writer in Europe. He was twice imprisoned in the Bastille, once beaten by the servants of a nobleman he had insulted, exiled to England for three years and to Prussia for three more, and spent the last two decades of his life at Ferney on the Swiss border, close enough to run. He wrote fifty tragedies, a national epic, histories that invented a new way of doing history, twenty thousand letters, and the pamphlets and squibs that made him dangerous.

Topics Voltaire addresses

• écrasez l'infâme
• toleration
• deism and the watchmaker God
• the argument from design
• optimism and the best of all possible worlds
• the Lisbon earthquake
• the Calas affair
• fanaticism
• superstition
• the infâme
• freedom of the press
• the philosophy of history
• the Essay on Manners
• the critique of Bossuet's providential history
• English liberty and the Lettres philosophiques
• Newton against Descartes
• Locke and the thinking matter question
• the soul and its mortality
• miracles
• biblical criticism
• enlightened despotism
• the canaille
• natural religion
• the conte philosophique

Converse with Voltaire on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Voltaire's own writing, cited to the page.