During the Enlightenment, the term Les philosophes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophes) basically refers to all public intellectuals who were proponents of rationalism, classical liberalism, and who engaged in political criticism, even many were not scholars on metaphysics themselves. To this day, because of their great historical influences to political philosophy in general, they are often simply called "philosophers".

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a good summary,

> At the center of his work was a new conception of philosophy and the philosopher that in several crucial respects influenced the modern concept of each. Yet in other ways Voltaire was not a philosopher at all in the modern sense of the term.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voltaire

And Candide.