About the author …

Voltaire (1694—1778), whose pen name is Fran¸ois-Marie Arouet, is a French literary moralist greatly influenced by the epistemology of John Locke and Issac Newton. In his Candide, he caricatures Leibniz's doctrine that this is the "best of all possible worlds." He is perhaps best known for a humanism entailing an empirical skepticism of dogmatic religious and social doctrine; for these views, he was briefly imprisioned and then exiled to England. While there, when he became subject to a mob of British ridiculing him as being French, he is reported to reply, "You wish to kill me because I am a Frenchman. Am I not punished enough in not being born an Englishman?" It is said the mob was won over.[1] Later, while in Prussia, he served as an ambassador-spy.