Denis Diderot e o conto filosófico

o Suplemento à viagem de Bougainville

Abstract

In the eighteenth century, the relationship between Philosophy and Literature was very strict. Despite the debate about the superiority of one in relation to the other, many authors freely employed literary resources to benefit philosophical expression. Denis Diderot is a thinker who transits between these two domains in an outstanding way. In this paper, we try to explicit one way of reading together the Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, a literary work, and the chapter ‘Sur la morale’, of Diderot’s contribution to Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes. More specifically, we will show how the tale works as the space of development for philosophical thinking as it is synthesized in the Histoire des deux Indes’s chapter. In order to do so, we will focus on one aspect of the Theory of Three Codes: the matter of sexual freedom in the Tahitian example.