[PHILOS-L] Call for papers - Diderot Studies 2027 [30 April 2026] - Diderot and History

[Matteo Marcheschi]

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Call for papers - Diderot Studies 2027 - Diderot and History. Writing and Forms of Time between Philosophy, Science, and Politics [proposal by 30 April 2026]

 In the face of the crisis of classical and religious models for interpreting the overall meaning of time and history, the eighteenth century appears as an era of reorganization and experimentation in historicity and its categories. Rousseau and Voltaire, Boulanger and Hume, Montesquieu and Smith are among the protagonists of this conjuncture.
And Diderot? Is there a Diderotian thought of history? What does Diderot do, in the concrete practice of his philosophical activity, when he speaks of the history of philosophies, of techniques, or of the Earth? What temporal categories does he mobilize?

This dossier of Diderot Studies is devoted to the relationship between Diderot and history. The aim will not be to turn Diderot into a “historian”, but to reconstruct the multiple ways in which the philosopher interprets, on the basis of concrete cases, the historical meanings of time’s becoming, by exploring his models of duration, interruption, and continuity.
Moreover, if history appears as a constant preoccupation of Diderot’s philosophy, without ever giving rise to any systematic treatise, it is because the problem of duration lies at the very heart of Diderotian materialism. Substantial monism produces a plurality of functions and configurations by stratifying the memory of time in form: it is because history is a constitutive dimension of matter that this one matter becomes capable of doing many things. From this perspective ramifies the constellation of histories – political, colonial, natural, artistic, intellectual, scientific – that runs through Diderot’s work.

Within this framework, the present thematic dossier of Diderot Studies proposes to examine, from a range of disciplinary perspectives and approaches, Diderot’s reflection on history along four interlaced and non-exclusive axes:

1. Writing history. What does it mean, for Diderot, to write history – of ideas, of the arts and techniques, of nature, of the human being? How do these different forms of historicity, applied to distinct objects and bodies of knowledge, interact with one another?
In the Encyclopédie, Diderot constructs a history of philosophers and philosophies: according to what criteria of selection and what temporal segmentations? In the case of techniques and the arts, how does he narrate the rhythms of invention, transmission, and practices of making? Is there, in this domain, a specific historicity (the Salons)? In his reflection on nature and matter (De l’interprétation de la nature; Le Rêve de D’Alembert; Éléments de physiologie), what models of transformation, duration, and discontinuity are deployed? And in the history of the great and of nations (Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron; Observations sur le Nakaz), what political function does historical narrative assume? More generally, what is the relationship between the internal times of knowledges – discoveries, errors, accumulations, stabilizations – and external durations – fashions, salons, institutions, economies of attention – that select what counts as new, useful, true (De l’interprétation de la nature)?

2. Categories and models of duration. Which categories enable Diderot to interrogate historical meaning and to articulate durations? How are they formed and how do they transform over the course of his works? Catastrophes, revolutions, progress, stases, irreversibility, parallelisms, returns, permanences, and recurrences are not mere descriptive labels: how do they become operative conceptual instruments, capable of guiding the reading of the past and the critique of the present? What models of duration, transformation, and crisis do they presuppose? And how does Diderot confront, on this terrain, classical temporality and the alternative models, competing or convergent, elaborated by his contemporaries?

3. Non-homogeneous times and the critique of Eurocentrism. What becomes of the use of historical categories when they come into contact with non-homogeneous temporalities? How does colonial and commercial experience compel one to think different rhythms and to measure oneself against unstable criteria of comparison? What narrative and conceptual devices make thinkable, in the Histoire des deux Indes and in the Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, the plurality of times and, more generally, the critique of Eurocentrism in history?

4. Forms of writing time and history. How does writing contribute to the construction of historical intelligibility? What narrative and argumentative strategies does Diderot mobilize in order to think history, and what do they make possible (or impossible) from the standpoint of regimes of temporality? What function do dialogue, montage, conjecture, exemplum, and thought experiment assume in defining the relations between description of the past, critique of the present, and anticipation of the future? And how does the choice of form affect the very possibility of establishing continuities, thresholds, caesuras, accelerations, and returns?

Deadlines and submission procedures

Dossier editor: Matteo Marcheschi

Proposals must reach us by 30 April 2026, in the form of an abstract (300 words), sent by email to matteo.m...@cfs.unipi.it 

The full text of the selected proposals must reach us on 31 December 2026 (30,000 to 40,000 characters, including spaces and notes), and contributions will be published in Diderot Studies in 2027.

Contributions may be written in French or English.

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Matteo Marcheschi

Contrattista di Ricerca - Art. 22 L. 240/2010 (Research Fellow)

Università di Pisa - Dipartimento di civiltà e forme del sapere

Via Pasquale Paoli, 15, 56126 Pisa

https://www.unipi.it/ateneo/organizzazione/persone/matteo-marcheschi-163031/

https://unipi.academia.edu/MatteoMarcheschi

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