[Revised entry by J.B. Shank on August 21, 2024.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html]
Francois-Marie d’Arouet (1694 – 1778), better known by his pen name Voltaire, was a French writer and public activist who played a singular role in defining the eighteenth-century movement called the Enlightenment. At the center of his work was a new conception of philosophy and the philosopher that in several crucial respects influenced the modern concept of each. Yet in other ways Voltaire was not a philosopher at all in the modern sense of the term. He wrote as many plays, stories, and poems as patently philosophical…

Read the full article which is published on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (external link)