Diderot et l’esthétique de l’empirisme anglais. Du dessein et de la théorie des formes

Denis Diderot kept a fairly close relationship with the eighteenth-century British philosophers, from which he drew many influences and suggestions, even if from a critical point of view, as it can be seen in his translation, made in 1745, of Lord Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit (1699), where the free interpretation of the original text offers interesting hints for further investigations; or in the criticism of the aesthetic theories of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson advanced by Diderot in his voice on "Beautiful" (1752) for the Encyclopédie; or again, in the Lockean echoes that resonate in some of his references to the sensory experience as a foundational knowledge. The purpose of this essay is to examine some crucial moments of Diderot's aesthetics, trying to verify the weight and influence of British thinkers, along with the reasons for any discrepancies.