Description

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This is the first anthology ever published to feature the writings of leading eighteenth-century thinkers on the subjects of atheism, religion, freethought, and secularism.

Editor S. T. Joshi has compiled notable essays by writers from Germany, France, England, and early America. The contributors include Denis Diderot (a principal author of the multivolume French Encyclopédie), Baron d'Holbach (System of Nature, 1770), Voltaire (Philosophical Dictionary), David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Ethan Allen, Thomas Paine, and other lesser-known thinkers.
     With a comprehensive introduction providing the intellectual and cultural context of the essays, this outstanding compilation will be of interest to students of philosophy, religious studies, and eighteenth-century intellectual history.

About the Author

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S. T. Joshi is a freelance writer, a scholar, and an editor. He is the author of The Unbelievers: The Evolution of Modern Atheism, and he is the editor of Atheism: A Reader; The Agnostic Reader; God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong; H. L. Mencken on Religion; Documents of American Prejudice; In Her Place: A Documentary History of Prejudice against Women; and What Is Man? And Other Irreverent Essays. He is also editor of the American Rationalist.

Praise For…

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“This volume is a testament to that courage and to the fact that we modern unbelievers may take pleasure in realizing that we have philosophical and epistemological roots going back centuries.”
—American Rationalist

“This anthology brilliantly samples the work of the leading thinkers of the European and American Enlightenments that culminated in our era’s secular naturalism. Especially relevant are the sections by Locke, Jefferson, and Madison that counter the regressive efforts by today’s religious Right to lead us back to the Dark Ages.”
—Edd Doerr, president of Americans for Religious Liberty and a columnist for Free Inquiry

“Joshi’s enlightening The Unbelievers featured his analyses of the defenses of atheism offered by such noted nonbelievers as H. L. Mencken, Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and others. What has long been missing from the atheist corpus is a compilation of detailed arguments from the earliest writers on the controversial topic: Voltaire, d’Holbach, Bentham, Madison, Jefferson, and Paine. The Original Atheists has now filled this void and, in effect, completed the magnum opus Joshi started in 2011.”
—William Harwood, author of God, Jesus and the Bible