The Original Atheists

January 1, 2014

In this anthology, Joshi (The Unbelievers: The Evolution of Modern Atheism) has compiled substantial selections on the subject of nonbelief from more than a dozen leading French, German, British, and American thinkers of the 18th century. What sets this collection apart from other recent anthologies, such as Joshi's own Atheism: A Reader and the late Christopher Hitchens's The Portable Atheist, is its strict focus on this particular time period. This compendium contains only one overlapping piece with each of those previous works. Included here are writings from both major figures, such as Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, and Thomas Jefferson, and lesser-known thinkers, such as Anthony Collins and Julien Offray de La Mettrie. As Joshi notes in his useful and context-setting introduction, although some of the writers featured here were not explicitly atheists or agnostics (at least not publicly), each greatly influenced and laid the intellectual groundwork for future generations of atheistic thought. While there were certainly atheists before the 18th century, this era proved a significant turning point in the history of free thought, thus meriting this volume. VERDICT Recommended for readers interested in the early history of nonbelief and students of 18th-century intellectual history.--Brian Sullivan, Alfred Univ. Lib., NY

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