During our class in the 24 hour reading room, one of the books we looked at was Denis Diderot’s “Encylop\u00e9die, ou dictionnaire raisonn\u00e9 des sciences, des arts et des m\u00e9tiers”. Published in France between 1751 and 1752, it\u00a0was a general encyclopedia that also gave instruction on how to perform almost any task. We studied a long excerpt from this text in my French Literature class, and found that certain\u00a0entries were infused with specific\u00a0philosophy instead of\u00a0simply unbiased disseminations of information.<\/p>\n
This Encyclopedia\u00a0provided thoughts that were considered to be controversial at the time, reflecting theories of the Enlightenment. According to Diderot, its aim was to “change the way people think.” The excerpt from my French class argued a concept that was widely debated at the time and still is today: if animals have souls. It also explicated Ren\u00e9 Descartes’s theory of animals being machines due to the way in which they live their lives by ‘mindlessly’ performing actions to\u00a0sustain their survival\u00a0– actions that could be dictated to\u00a0a machine in steps.<\/p>\n
Looking at one of the volumes in class today, I was fascinated by the\u00a0versatile nature\u00a0of this text.\u00a0Not only do its in-depth instructions for certain tasks give us a window into what was valued at the time, but the philosophy also provides us with\u00a0the emerging schools of thought. These, at the time, were all provided in an encyclopedia, which probably wouldn’t have been considered a cultural artifact. It raises the question of how or in what ways could\u00a0our modern encyclopedia be deemed as antiquated in another 200 years from now?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
During our class in the 24 hour reading room, one of the books we looked at was Denis Diderot’s “Encylop\u00e9die, ou dictionnaire raisonn\u00e9 des sciences, des arts et des m\u00e9tiers”. Published in France between 1751 and 1752, it\u00a0was a general encyclopedia that also gave instruction on how to perform almost any task. We studied a … <\/p>\n