There's been a lot of articles on Diderot lately, probably because of the recent publication of Curran's "Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely". Diderot is really a fascinating guy and unfairly obscure in the English-speaking world, where we tend to remember him (if at all) as just one of the people behind the Encyclopédie. But he really was a major Enlightenment figure, on par with Voltaire. Curran's book in particular shows how forward-thinking Diderot's thought was -- from religion (or the rejection of it), to belief in the power of the people to rule themselves, to the belief that science and technology can improve life, he seems much more like a 19th or 20th century thinker, not an 18th century one.