Appeal for an English Edition of Diderot’s Jack the Fatalist
by Josef Weber
Cover of Contemporary Issues #15 (1953)
Weber article 1 (first 3 pages)
Weber article 2 (next 14 pages)
Weber article 3 (remaining 36 pages)
PDF of Josef Weber’s “Appeal for an English Edition of Diderot’s Jack the Fatalist.” I apologize for the clunky and fragmentary copying; I no longer have the original journal. The article is difficult to read in this online version, but if you print it out it is quite readable.
This article (under the pseudonym William Lunen) appeared in Contemporary Issues: A Magazine for a Democracy of Content #15 (London/New York, July-August 1953). Weber refers extensively to J. Robert Loy’s book Diderot’s Determined Fatalist: A Critical Appreciation of “Jacques the Fatalist” (1950). That book is long out of print and rather difficult to find, but Loy’s excellent translation of Diderot’s book appeared in 1959 (New York University Press) and was reprinted in 1978 (Norton). Loy’s translation is now out of print, but used copies can easily be found online, and in any case there are now also two or three other translations of the book.
For a brief appreciation of Weber and his group, see Josef Weber and Contemporary Issues. For two other articles by Weber, see The Great Utopia and The Problem of Social Consciousness in Our Time.
No copyright.