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
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.
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
As I approached, I saw that my dear philosophe spake in terms of remonstration to the Serjeant, which officer protested their presence on the ship.
From "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves" by M.T. Anderson
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.
