Voltaire
Personal Information
Description
François-Marie Arouet, better known by the pen name Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion and free trade. Voltaire was a prolific writer and produced works in almost every literary form including plays, poetry, novels, essays, historical and scientific works, more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken supporter of social reform, despite strict censorship laws and harsh penalties for those who broke them. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma and the French institutions of his day. Voltaire was one of several Enlightenment figures (along with Montesquieu, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau) whose works and ideas influenced important thinkers of both the American and French Revolutions.
Books
Candido
Donde se da cuenta de como fue criado Candido en una hermosa quinta, y como de ella fue echado a patadas.
Mémoires
Selected writings
Correspondance
Selected works
Voltaire
The portable Voltaire
"The Portable Voltaire" is an excellent compendium of the major works of the man who became the most famous iconoclast of the French Enlightenment. One of the attractions of this particular volume is the introduction by Ben Ray Redman, who delivers with witty, flowing prose an extremely interesting short biography and a summary of the man's philosophy. Normally I don't bother to mention a book's introduction in a review, but Redman's is so good I make a notable exception. Voltaire was a man of contrasts. He was sickly and feeble but miraculously managed to extend his lifespan to eighty-four years, travel abroad, and survive in prison; he was made wealthy by various benefactors and seemed generally happy but could be very cynical and antagonistic in his writing; and most notoriously, he was a deist whose hatred of Christianity could make him appear to be an atheist. Most of what he hated about Christianity was the clergy--their hypocrisy, their adherence to practices he found absurd, their conceit that everything in the universe is made exclusively for man's consumption and amusement--and the superstition and fanaticism exhibited by the more extreme practitioners of the faith. -- from (June 16, 2014).
Miscellanies
The philosophy of history
Essai sur les mœurs et l'esprit des nations
Il n'est guere possible de trouver un plan dans cette longue dissertation, ecrite en 1765 et placee a partir de 1769 en tete de l'Essai sur les mOEurs. Voltaire y passe allegrement des Chinois aux Americains, des Grecs aux Hebreux, mais aussi de la geologie aux miracles et de l'immortalite de l'ame aux histoires de loups-garous, Le texte semble ecrit d'inspiration; il comporte pourtant des retouches.