Fontenelle Bernard Le Bovier de (1657–1757), French writer who heralded the age of the philosophes. A product of Jesuit education, he was a versatile freethinker with skeptical inclinations. Dialogues of the Dead (1683) showed off his analytical mind and elegant style. In 1699, he was appointed secretary of the Academy of Sciences. He composed famous eulogies of scientists; defended the superiority of modern science over tradition in Digression on Ancients and Moderns (1688); popularized Copernican astronomy in Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) – famous for postulating the inhabitation of planets; stigmatized superstition and credulity in History of Oracles (1687) and The Origin of Fables (1724); promoted Cartesian physics in The Theory of Cartesian Vortices (1752); and wrote Elements of Infinitesimal Calculus (1727) in the wake of Newton and Leibniz. J.-L.S.