Denis Diderot (1713-1784) is best known as a co-editor, with Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, of the ‘Encyclopedie’ --a monument to rationalist, secularist, and humanist thought of the French Enlightenment. The central project in all his writing was to dispel supernatural and theistic superstitions and to ground all phenomena in naturalistic explanations. That this could lead to panpsychism is perhaps surprising.

Like LaMattrie and Maupertuis before him, Diderot grappled with a fundamental problem: Given that there is neither a God nor an immaterial soul, one must still account for motion, life, and mind. Each of those three men had a strong intuition toward unity and holism, and all wanted to integrate the human into the natural world. They rejected the purely mechanistic interpretation of a universe of dead matter pushed around by myriad forces, and instead sought solutions in which life and sensitivity were inherent in all things. It is not surprising that, given these conditions and the state of scientific knowledge at the time, they came to similar conclusions