Book Description

Customer Reviews (2)

Reason's raison d'etre: The Discourse
The Encyclopedia of Diderot and d'Alembert, ancestor of all the others, was an attempt to arrange and systematize the knowledge developed in a scattered and fragmentary manner, on the ruins of the scholastic philosophy and the medieval encyclopedism.

D'Alembert wrote a preliminary discourse as justification of the work plan. The Encyclopedia suggested a genetic order ofthe knowledge, decided on the model of the Locke's empiricism, andfollowed a classification of the sciences, founded on the Bacon's Knowledge Tree (Memory/History, Reason/Philosophy and Imagination/Poetry).

The work was also a "reasoned dictionary of sciences, arts and trades" as it explained the general principles of every science and arts, both liberal and mechanics, and their most remarkable details.

The part of the Discourse that perhaps the reader will appreciate more, concerns the history of the progress of human thought: here the science is considered in the prospect of the modern civilization's making and triumph. Of particulat interest is the passage where D'Alembert honours Bacon and Descartes as forerunners of Enlightenment's Age and prophets ofthe intellectual freedom.

The Encyclopedia offered to the middle class a new cultural model, of laical approach, rationally determined, bound to experience and turned to real life. The Enlightenment's faith in reason/rationality and progress fed on revolutionary conquests of rising middle class ( even Marx and Engels had words of admiration for the bourgeois enterprise).

Who wouldn't want a book recommended by Friederich the Great
The preliminary discourses are a surprisingly entertaining description of D'Alembert's ideas about knowledge and learning.This introduction to the great Encyclopedia of Diderot is an important work of the Enlightenment initself. ... Read more

Product Description
This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1759 edition by Zacharie Chatelain & fils, Amsterdam. ... Read more

Book Description
This book examines the origins of d'Alembert's philosophical ideas, and shows how abstract concepts such as force and mass were clarified and assimilated into the structure of classical mechanics. But more than this, the book is a study of the relations between science and philosophy during the Enlightenment, as reflected in the life and work of Jean d'Alembert, one of that period's most prominent spokesmen. By showing the interactions of one philosophe with the scientific, social and philosophical communities of the eighteenth century, Professor Hankins reveals how Enlightenment philosophy borrowed heavily from the methods and goals of science. ... Read more

Product Description
This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1772 edition by Jean-Marie Bruyset, Lyon. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Not bad
Anyone familiar with where I could find an English translation of L'Encyclopedie, or at the very least the section 'Cynique'. ... Read more