Denis Diderot

He edited the Encyclopedie, first with d'Alembert and, after d'Alembert's 1758 resignation, alone, seeing the 17 volumes of text through to 1765 and the volumes of plates to 1772 despite a suspended licence and a royal ban, and wrote nearly six thousand of its articles himself.

He was also a philosopher and writer whose Lettre sur les aveugles (1749) led to three months in Vincennes prison and whose D'Alembert's Dream and Rameau's Nephew, left unpublished in his lifetime, are counted among the masterpieces of Enlightenment thought.

From 1759 he wrote reviews of the Paris art exhibitions for Grimm's Correspondance litteraire, work the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy credits with inventing the art critic, and he also wrote influential essays on the theory of drama.

In 1764 he discovered that the publisher Le Breton had cut and altered his articles in the proofs after he had approved them, and wrote that his work had been 'massacred'; his daughter recalled that he nearly abandoned the project, but the final volumes were completed.

The episode is consistent with a capacity to keep a very large editorial project going after a serious setback. Persistence

In 1759 Grimm invited him to write about the biennial art exhibitions at the Louvre for the Correspondance litteraire, and he went on to write a series of Salons, combining the eye of the connoisseur with philosophical argument.

The sustained series is consistent with a strong sensitivity to how visual art represents human experience. Aesthetic Sensitivity

In 1749 he was imprisoned at Vincennes for three months after the Lettre sur les aveugles; on his release in November he was already working on the project that became the Encyclopedie, whose Prospectus appeared in 1750 and which occupied him for most of the next two decades.

The sequence is consistent with an unconventional thinker who kept pursuing his intellectual aims after official punishment. Independent Thinking