FONTENELLE, BERNARD. - Writer and philosopher, b. at Rouen on 11 Feb. 1657, d. at Paris on 9 Jan. 1757. More than to frigid poems, his fame is entrusted to various dialogues and short treatises, of extreme stylistic clarity, of refined but arid intelligence; in his long life is almost delivered the transition from Cartesianism to the most self-aware Enlightenment.
In his works (among the most famous: Dialogues des morts [1683], Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes [1686], Histoire des oracles [1687], Digression sur les anciens et sur les modernes [1688], De l'origine des fables [1724]) there is the attempt to reduce ethics, logic and theology itself to an essentially human plane, in the clear negation of every positive essence of the idea of the infinite and in the admission of a naturalistic mechanism. F. is not, however, averse to accepting a finalistic explanation wherever mechanistic explanation stops: the animal world itself was not formed by the chance encounter of atoms, but had need of the work of an intelligent being: the preordination of the mechanism of the universe postulates the existence of God, but of the typical God of the deists who is not imminent, moment by moment, over the life of the cosmos. F. rejects the idea of immortality and opposes every revealed religion, affirming among other things that miracles are impostures. He seems to believe in skepticism: to elevate it almost to a belief: certainly he believes with great conviction in the myth of progress and in the superiority of the moderns over the ancients. The Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes were placed on the index on 22 Sept. 1687. But just as the other works of F. had an enormous diffusion in the salon circles of his age, also because they relied on the easy vein of the author as a popularizer.
Bibliography6 works
Massimo Petrocchi