philosophe
Americannoun
plural
philosophes-
any of the popular French intellectuals or social philosophers of the 18th century, as Diderot, Rousseau, or Voltaire.
-
a philosophaster.
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.
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
Catherine the Great had repeatedly expressed her desire to meet the celebrated philosophe.
From New York Times • Jan. 10, 2013
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
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.
