Kate E. Tunstall - Blindness and Enlightenment

For their conversation, curiosity and insights, I wish to thank Wilda Anderson, Alain Cantillon, Terence Cave, Tim Chesters, Marion Chottin, Andrea Christofidou, Nicholas Cronk, Andrew Curran, Lesel Dawson, Milad Doueihi, Nathalie Ferrand, Finn Fordham, Jim Grant, Marian Hobson, Katherine Ibbett, Anna Kemp, Carl Knappett, Conrad Leyser, Anna Lucas, Patrick Mackie, Thibaut Maus de Rolley, Chris Miller, Ben Morgan, Michael Moriarty, Isabelle Moreau, Jean-Paul Sermain, Joanna Stalnaker, Bernard Sufrin, Alexis Tadi, Rowan Tomlinson, Stephen Williams and Amy Wygant, as well as my family, Pat and Mike Tunstall, Ben Tunstall and Katherine Skellon.

A number of sounding boards gave me very helpful feedback at various stages. I thank, in particular, the Early Modern French Research Seminar (University of Oxford), the Early Modern Seminar (University of London), the research group Frontires de la Modernit (Maison Franaise dOxford), the seminar Formes et Ides de la Renaissance aux Lumires (Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle), the Worcester College Womens Research Seminar, and the audience at the session In and Around the Encyclopdie (French Studies, Oxford).

The University of Oxford provides an ideal environment in which to think, talk and write, and Worcester College has sustained me in these and other no less essential ways: I am particularly grateful to the Senior Common Room staff, Neil Turner, Asia Twardowska and Paula Wallbridge, for allowing me last-minute lunches, and to the Head Gardener, Simon Bagnall, and his team for creating an amazing spectacle of nature in the College gardens. Other support, moral as well as technical and administrative, was provided by Cath Fraser, Jane Gover, Karen James, Marilyn Peddie, Elizabeth Smith and Emma Standhaft.

It was my extraordinary good fortune to have a team of readers to guide me through what I had written when I could no longer see it clearly and to suggest signposts, alternative routes and short cuts. I wish to thank Emma Herdman for her remarkable tact and eagle eyes, Richard Scholar for his terrifically helpful pesky squiggles and his willingness to debate them at short notice, Caroline Warman for her exceptional generosity of ideas and for knowing when things are funny (and when theyre not), and Wes Williams for his fine-tuned ear for echoes and rhythms, or perhaps that should be rhythms and echoes. My greatest debts are to Alain, his one-eyed horse and le virage Viala .

Oxford and Saint Affrique (Aveyron), 2010

Some of the material appearing in Chapters 1, 2 and 6 has appeared elsewhere as Des circonstances assez peu philosophiques: Diderots aveugle-n du Puiseaux in French Studies Bulletin , 99 (2006), 336; The Judgement of Experience: Reading and Seeing in Diderots Lettre sur les aveugles in French Studies , 62.4 (2008), 40416; Pr-histoire dun emblme des Lumires: laveugle-n de Montaigne Diderot, in Isabelle Moreau (ed.), Les Lumires en mouvement: la circulation des ides au XVIIIe sicle (Lyon: ENS, 2009), pp.17397; LAveugle qui suit laveugle qui suit laveugle: la philosophie intertextuelle de la Lettre sur les aveugles in Marion Chottin (ed.), LAveugle et le philosophe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne, 2009), pp.6381; and Philosophy, Ethics and the Work of Fiction, Alexis Tadi and Richard Scholar (eds), Fiction and the Frontiers of Knowledge in Europe, 15001800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), pp.10721.