philosophe
Americannoun
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any of the popular French intellectuals or social philosophers of the 18th century, as Diderot, Rousseau, or Voltaire.
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a philosophaster.
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of philosophe
Borrowed into English from French around 1770–80
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
It was this understanding that made the French philosophe so eloquent a defender of the rule of law and so severe a critic of direct taxation.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 15, 2026
Rousseau was the great contrarian philosophe of the Enlightenment.
From Textbooks ● Jan. 1, 2020
Adam, perhaps the novel’s only personable creation, is a kind of demiurgic naïf, somewhere between a wide-eyed ingénue and an Enlightenment philosophe.
From The New Yorker ● Apr. 15, 2019
Two centuries later the French philosophe Voltaire would mock the empire as “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire,” but to Charles, his realm was holy indeed.
From Salon ● Apr. 13, 2014
Napoleon had popularized the word, which had first been used by the French philosophe Destutt de Tracy, whom Jefferson had read and admired enormously.
From "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation" by Joseph J. Ellis
His 1770s busts of Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and especially his sculpture of a seated Voltaire, have influenced ever since how the French picture their philosophes.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 12, 2026
Roland had grown up reading the philosophes and was influenced by Diderot and Rousseau, among others.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 2, 2026
Frederick so impressed the French philosophes that Voltaire came to live at his palace for two years until the two of them had a falling out.
From Textbooks ● Jan. 1, 2020
They came to believe in many cases in the essential justice of the arguments of the philosophes and did not see anything contradictory between the exercise of their power and enlightenment ideas.
From Textbooks ● Jan. 1, 2020
The stacks of Nahuatl manuscripts in Mexican archives depict the tlamatinime meeting to exchange ideas and gossip, as did the Vienna Circle and the French philosophes and the Taisho-period Kyoto school.
From "1491" by Charles C. Mann
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
