Paul Thiry d’Holbach (1723-1789) was one of the most important figures of the European Enlightenment. His writings put forward a thorough-going materialistic and deterministic philosophy; they are inspired by a profound dislike of superstition and religious belief and had a huge impact on European philosophy and culture, from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth. In spite of that, d’Holbach is now somewhat neglected as a thinker and very few of his works are available in a reliable critical edition.
Created by Ruggero Sciuto (Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford) in collaboration with the ARTFL Project, and generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, Tout d’Holbach brings together fully searchable transcriptions of the vast majority of d’Holbach’s works. It includes all of d’Holbach’s original writings, as well as most of his philosophical and scientific translations. Moving forward, we hope to add full transcriptions of d’Holbach’s editions of other authors’ works, as well as works whose attribution to the baron is more controversial. The database does not include d’Holbach’s correspondence or his contributions to collaborative works such as the Encyclopédie or the Histoire des deux Indes.
We would like to thank the Classiques des Sciences Sociales project for their hard work in digitizing many of d'Holbach's works as well as for their permission to use their digital texts for the Tout d'Holbach. You can find a listing of all of their publicly available digitized transcriptions of d'Holbach on their website.
The Voltaire Foundation is currently working on a born-digital critical edition of d’Holbach’s writings: Digital d’Holbach. Unlike Digital d’Holbach, the present database is not a critical edition: none of the texts is annotated, and the transcriptions, while broadly accurate, may contain occasional typos. Tout d’Holbach is a research tool, and one that, we hope, will prove invaluable to researchers collaborating on the Digital d’Holbach project as well as to scholars working on the European Enlightenment, more broadly.
To search Tout d’Holbach click HERE.
If you would like to know more about Digital d’Holbach, or if you would like to collaborate with us, please contact Ruggero Sciuto at ruggero.sciuto@voltaire.ox.ac.uk
