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Diderot and the geoboard

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2016

John Glenn
John Glenn*
Affiliation:
Kesteven College of Education, Stoke Rochford, Grantham, Lincs. NG33 5EJ
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Extract

The first published description of the geoboard appears to have been given as an incidental illustration to Denis Diderot’s Letter on the blind (1774).

The savants of the eighteenth century were interested in blindness as a problem for speculative philosophy. If the mind is a tabula rasa at birth, how will it develop if the sovereign sense is absent? Diderot held that the blind man would not only form different physical concepts, but different aesthetic and even different moral values. In the end he would inevitably come to a different set of religious beliefs and hence, Diderot argued, the concept of God was relative to our senses.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Mathematical Gazette , Volume 62 , Issue 420 , June 1978 , pp. 116 - 118
Copyright
Copyright © Mathematical Association 1978 

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References

1. Diderot, Denis, Lettre sur les aveugles. London (1749). (Modern edition in Textes Litteraires Français, Geneva 1951.)Google Scholar
2. Saunderson, Nicholas, Elements of algebra. Cambridge (1740). (Contribution to the Memoir from John Colson, Saunderson’s successor.)Google Scholar