Jul 8, 2015 12:47 AM
http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2015/07...story.html
EXCERPT: [...] One of the 18th century’s most original thinkers, [Denis] Diderot was also the Encyclopédie’s principal editor and one of the most prolific contributors. Looking back, modern readers can see what Diderot could not. Far from being finished, the Encyclopédie had only begun its remarkable life.
Efforts to record all human knowledge stretch from Pliny the Elder’s massive “Natural History,” compiled in the first century AD, to the early 17th century and Francis Bacon’s “Great Instauration,” his encyclopedic project to arrange the fruit of empirical investigation on what he referred to as “the branches of the tree of knowledge.” (Bacon died before he could finish his work, contracting pneumonia after stuffing snow into a dead chicken to see how long he could preserve its flesh.) Bacon’s tree cast its long shadow into the next century, when the Scottish journalist Ephraim Chambers published his “Cyclopedia: Or, Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences.”
Not only had Chambers written the work alone — a performance, he modestly noted, “to which a Man’s whole Life seems scarce equal” — but he also launched a Rube Goldbergian series of events that led to the Encyclopédie.
[...] Diderot was himself a little blind: How could he not see the trouble he was courting? The rumblings of skepticism and materialism in his books, like that of his fellow philosophes, threatened to undermine the country’s political and religious authorities. Shortly after he became co-editor of the Encyclopédie in 1749, these same authorities had Diderot arrested and tossed into prison. While his wife and friends panicked, his publishers ran around Paris with their wigs on fire, as they explained to court officials that they had sunk 250,000 livres in the affair — roughly $3 million. They insisted that Diderot was essential to an enterprise that would bring France not just glory but also revenue. Their pleas prevailed, and Diderot was released three months later. And he proved his editors right: The Encyclopédie did bring renown to France, but not the sort his watchers reckoned on....
EXCERPT: [...] One of the 18th century’s most original thinkers, [Denis] Diderot was also the Encyclopédie’s principal editor and one of the most prolific contributors. Looking back, modern readers can see what Diderot could not. Far from being finished, the Encyclopédie had only begun its remarkable life.
Efforts to record all human knowledge stretch from Pliny the Elder’s massive “Natural History,” compiled in the first century AD, to the early 17th century and Francis Bacon’s “Great Instauration,” his encyclopedic project to arrange the fruit of empirical investigation on what he referred to as “the branches of the tree of knowledge.” (Bacon died before he could finish his work, contracting pneumonia after stuffing snow into a dead chicken to see how long he could preserve its flesh.) Bacon’s tree cast its long shadow into the next century, when the Scottish journalist Ephraim Chambers published his “Cyclopedia: Or, Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences.”
Not only had Chambers written the work alone — a performance, he modestly noted, “to which a Man’s whole Life seems scarce equal” — but he also launched a Rube Goldbergian series of events that led to the Encyclopédie.
[...] Diderot was himself a little blind: How could he not see the trouble he was courting? The rumblings of skepticism and materialism in his books, like that of his fellow philosophes, threatened to undermine the country’s political and religious authorities. Shortly after he became co-editor of the Encyclopédie in 1749, these same authorities had Diderot arrested and tossed into prison. While his wife and friends panicked, his publishers ran around Paris with their wigs on fire, as they explained to court officials that they had sunk 250,000 livres in the affair — roughly $3 million. They insisted that Diderot was essential to an enterprise that would bring France not just glory but also revenue. Their pleas prevailed, and Diderot was released three months later. And he proved his editors right: The Encyclopédie did bring renown to France, but not the sort his watchers reckoned on....