Download or read book The Encyclopedists as Individuals written by Frank A. Kafker and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the Encyclop die is one of the landmarks of eighteenth-century thought and one of the most famous encyclopedias of all time, most of its collaborators are scarcely known. This is unfair and misleading: the editors, Diderot and d'Alembert, were able directors and prolific contributors, but they needed the help of many others to complete such an ambitious and trying enterprise. This biological dictionary also seeks to deepen our knowledge of the Encyclopedists. Scholars frequently generalise about the contributors' social background, politics, religious beliefs, and other matters without being able to speak knowledgeably about many more than a dozen Encyclopedists. But, as we shall see, the Encyclopedists do not lend themselves to stereotypes. They were not a sect of like-minded thinkers, even though contemporaries and later historians believed otherwise. Some of them met at such salons as the baron d'Holbach's and madame d'Epinay's or at such learned societies as the Paris Acad mie royale des sciences or the Acad mie fran aise; but others did not know each other, and they certainly did not try to co-ordinate policies. Even if they had, they would have failed. These biographical profiles indicate that the Encyclopedists were not united by a common social background, occupation, or ideology. Dissimilarities among the Encyclopedists are not surprising considering how they came to write for the enterprise. At the start, the publishers and their first editor, Jean-Paul de Gua de Malves, recruited people to help them revise and translate Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia. After Diderot and d'Alembert had assumed the editorship, the work took on a polemical purpose - to reform the Old Regime. But it also remained a general encyclopedia requiring contributors with a knowledge of such non-controversial subjects as the harp, wood engraving, or bridge building. Also, on controversial subjects, the editors accepted contributions that differed from their own opinions. Scholars pursuing research in prosopography, social history, and many facets of the eighteenth century will find something of value in profiles of so many men of letters, clergymen, artisans, physicians, and scientists.
Download or read book The Encyclopedists as Individuals written by Frank A. Kafker and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Encyclopedists as a Group written by Frank A. Kafker and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collective biography examines the similarities and differences among the 140 collaborators identified as having written articles for the seventeen folio volumes of text. It discusses the following topics: the family background, formal education, and occupational choice of the encyclopedists; how and where they were recruited for the Encyclop die and their compensation; their contributions to the work and wheter they were censored or persecuted or both because of them; their political and religious ideas; their productivity in old age; and, for those who lived past 1789, how they reacted to the French Revolution and the reign of Napoleon. In this book Frank A. kafker challenges a stereotype that has grown up about the Encyclopedits. Many scholars continue a tradition of writing about them as if they were united in a campaign to destroy the Old Regime. But they were, moreover, a varied collection of men of letters, physicians, scientists, craftsmen, scholars, and others, each frequently supporting his own point of view with little central direction. The Encyclop die became not a party statement but rather a great compendium of knowledge, a mixture of ideas - some progressive and some conservative - filled with contradictions and innovations.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier written by Elizabeth A. Williams and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the key themes of the Enlightenment was the search for universal laws and truths that would help illuminate the workings of the universe. It is in such attitudes that we trace the origins of modern science and medicine. However, not all eighteenth century scientists and physicians believed that such universal laws could be found, particularly in relation to the differences between living and inanimate matter. From the 1740s physicians working in the University of Medicine of Montpellier began to contest Descartes's dualist concept of the body-machine that was being championed by leading Parisian medical 'mechanists'. In place of the body-machine perspective that sought laws universally valid for all phenomena, the vitalists postulated a distinction being living and other matter, offering a holistic understanding of the physical-moral relation in place of mind-body dualism. Their medicine was not based on mathematics and the unity of the sciences, but on observation of the individual patient and the harmonious activities of the 'body-economy'. Vitalists believed that Illness was a result of disharmony in this 'body-economy' which could only be remedied on an individual level depending on the patient's own 'natural' limitations. The limitations were established by a myriad of factors such as sex, class, age, temperament, region, and race, which negated the use of a single universal treatment for a particular ailment. Ultimately Montpelier medicine was eclipsed by that of Paris, a development linked to the dynamics of the Enlightenment as a movement bent on cultural centralisation, acquiring a reputation as a kind of anti-science of the exotic and the mad. Given the long-standing Paris-centrism of French cultural history, Montpellier vitalism has never been accorded the attention it deserves by historians. This study repairs that neglect.
Download or read book Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain written by Seth Rudy and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-10-02 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain tells the story of long-term aspirations to comprehend, record, and disseminate complete knowledge of the world. It draws on a wide range of literary and non-literary works from the early modern era and British Enlightenment.
Download or read book The Book of the People written by Dan Tsahor and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-07-04 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hebrew encyclopedias have an intriguing history. The genre, which began as modest initiatives to disseminate general knowledge and strengthen literacy among Russian Jews, quickly became the most popular in modern Hebrew literature, with tens of thousands of subscribers to publications such as Encyclopaedia Hebraica and Encyclopaedia Biblica. The makers of these vast bodies of knowledge hoped to demonstrate Hebrew’s mimetic power and the vitality of newly created Jewish research institutions. They also hoped that the encyclopedias would be an essential tool in shaping and reshaping Zionist national culture and nurturing an ideal national persona. Thus, the printed pages of the encyclopedias give us unique access to what Zionists were saying about themselves, how they perceived their neighbors, and what they were hoping for the future, thereby going beyond the official Zionists documents, newspaper articles, and the writings of intellectuals that have been used extensively by historians to narrate national consciousness. By bringing to the fore these unique texts, The Book of the People presents common perceptions of memory and collective identity that often do not fit with the narratives offered by historians of Zionism. In doing so, the book also exposes ethical codes that regulated the production of Zionist knowledge and endowed the encyclopedias with a rare status as a bona fide source for truths by people from diverse political and social backgrounds.
Download or read book The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge written by Peter B. Kaufman and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we create a universe of truthful and verifiable information, available to everyone? In The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge, MIT Open Learning’s Peter B. Kaufman describes the powerful forces that have purposely crippled our efforts to share knowledge widely and freely. Popes and their inquisitors, emperors and their hangmen, commissars and their secret police—throughout history, all have sought to stanch the free flow of information. Kaufman writes of times when the Bible could not be translated—you’d be burned for trying; when dictionaries and encyclopedias were forbidden; when literature and science and history books were trashed and pulped—sometimes along with their authors; and when efforts to develop public television and radio networks were quashed by private industry. In the 21st century, the enemies of free thought have taken on new and different guises—giant corporate behemoths, sprawling national security agencies, gutted regulatory commissions. Bereft of any real moral compass or sense of social responsibility, their work to surveil and control us are no less nefarious than their 16th- and 18th- and 20th- century predecessors. They are all part of what Kaufman calls the Monsterverse. The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge maps out the opportunities to mobilize for the fight ahead of us. With the Internet and other means of media production and distribution—video especially—at hand, knowledge institutions like universities, libraries, museums, and archives have a special responsibility now to counter misinformation, disinformation, and fake news—and especially efforts to control the free flow of information. A film and video producer and former book publisher, Kaufman begins to draft a new social contract for our networked video age. He draws his inspiration from those who fought tooth and nail against earlier incarnations of the Monsterverse—including William Tyndale in the 16th century; Denis Diderot in the 18th; untold numbers of Soviet and Central and East European dissidents in the 20th—many of whom paid the ultimate price. Their successors? Advocates of free knowledge like Aaron Swartz, of free software like Richard Stallman, of an enlightened public television and radio network like James Killian, of a freer Internet like Tim Berners-Lee, of fuller rights and freedoms like Edward Snowden. All have been striving to secure for us a better world, marked by the right balance between state, society, and private gain. The concluding section of the book, its largest piece, builds on their work, drawing up a progressive agenda for how today’s free thinkers can band together now to fight and win. With everything shut and everyone going online, The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge is a rousing call to action that expands the definition of what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century.
Download or read book Voltaire in Exile written by Ian Davidson and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Voltaire in Exile, Ian Davidson has re-created this period in the life of one of the giant figures of the Enlightenment. By painstakingly translating the rich correspondence between Voltaire and his family, members of the Court at Versailles, and the French intellectual elite, Davidson allows us to discover Voltaire the artist, the campaigner, the aesthete, the lover, the humorist. The result is a portrait of this funny, iconoclastic, complex, and ferociously intelligent individual - the man Diderot described as "the unique man of the century.""--Jacket.
Download or read book Diderot Studies written by Diana Guiragossian and published by Librairie Droz. This book was released on 2000 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Blueprint written by Stephen Werner and published by Summa Publications, Inc.. This book was released on 1993 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 2,569 engraved plates of the Encyclopedie are as central to its meaning as the articles or cross-references themselves. Plates change the discourse of "encyclopedisme" through a novel collaborative effort of written texts and pictures. With vignettes of Paris as their backdrop, they endorse an aesthetic of urban merveilleux. Ultimately they rewrite the encyclopedia genre. The Encyclopedie is far more than a traditional "illustrated" reference work; it is a modern pictorial encyclopedia. Its visionary or "blueprint" qualities are unique and were conceived by Diderot, the chief sponsor and architect of the plates. This work is richly illustrated with reproductions of the original plates. An exhaustive bibliography adds to the functional nature of this study. "Un petit livre tres excitant." --Dix-huitieme Siecle. "...this study is a fruitful examination of the Encyclopedie as an indisputable coherent fusion of the textual and the pictorial. It points the way to further investigation of what still remains a largely unexplored labyrinth of Enlightenment ideologies, values and concerns." --British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Download or read book The Reformation of Common Learning written by Howard Hotson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-24 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ramism was the most innovative and disruptive educational reform movement to sweep through the international Protestant world in the latter sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. During the 1620s, the Thirty Years' War destroyed the network of central European academies and universities which had generated most of this innovation. Students and teachers, fleeing the conflict in all directions, transplanted that tradition into many different geographical and cultural contexts in which it bore are wide variety of interrelated fruit. Within the Dutch Republic, post-Ramist method played a crucial role in the rapid assimilation of Cartesianism into a network of thriving young academies and universities. From England to east-central Europe, the tradition was no less important in accelerating the reception of Baconianism. In the easternmost outpost of the Reformed world in Transylvania, the displaced tradition generated a final flourishing of philosophical innovation which exercised a formative influence on the young Leibniz. The failure of all of these efforts to assemble the fruits of this tradition into an encyclopaedic synthesis marks a major watershed in Western intellectual history. The Reformation of Common Learning brings together all of these aspects of the tradition in a manner which roots them in deeper historical developments and relates a series of far-flung and poorly understood developments together in new ways.
Download or read book Scribner s Monthly an Illustrated Magazine for the People written by and published by . This book was released on 1918 with total page 892 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book This Is Enlightenment written by Clifford Siskin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debates about the nature of the Enlightenment date to the eighteenth century, when Imanual Kant himself addressed the question, “What is Enlightenment?” The contributors to this ambitious book offer a paradigm-shifting answer to that now-famous query: Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation. Enlightenment, they argue, needs to be engaged within the newly broad sense of mediation introduced here—not only oral, visual, written, and printed media, but everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between. With essays addressing infrastructure and genres, associational practices and protocols, this volume establishes mediation as the condition of possibility for enlightenment. In so doing, it not only answers Kant’s query; it also poses its own broader question: how would foregrounding mediation change the kinds and areas of inquiry in our own epoch? This Is Enlightenment is a landmark volumewith the polemical force and archival depth to start a conversation that extends across the disciplines that the Enlightenment itself first configured.
Download or read book The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church written by Frank Leslie Cross and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 1842 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uniquely authoritative and wide-ranging in its scope, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church is the indispensable one-volume reference work on all aspects of the Christian Church. It contains over 6,000 cross-referenced A-Z entries, and offers unrivalled coverage of all aspects of this vast and often complex subject, including theology, churches and denominations, patristic scholarship, the bible, the church calendar and its organization, popes, archbishops, saints, and mystics. In this revision, innumerable small changes have been made to take into account shifts in scholarly opinion, recent developments, such as the Church of England's new prayer book (Common Worship), RC canonizations, ecumenical advances and mergers, and, where possible, statistics. A number of existing articles have been rewritten to reflect new evidence or understanding, for example the Holy Sepulchre entry, and there are a few new articles. Perhaps most significantly, a great number of the bibliographies have been updated. Established since its first appearance in 1957 as an essential resource for ordinands, clergy, and members of religious orders, ODCC is an invaluable tool for academics, teachers, and students of church history and theology, as well as for the general reader.
Download or read book Prosopography Approaches and Applications written by K. S. B. Keats-Rohan and published by Occasional Publications UPR. This book was released on 2007 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of 29 essays, ranging from ancient to modern history and including Arabic-Islamic prosopography, covers all aspects of prosopography as currently practised.
Download or read book African and Caribbean People in Britain written by Hakim Adi and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2022-09-01 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major new history of Britain that transforms our understanding of this country's past 'I've waited so long so read a comprehensively researched book about Black history on this island. This is it: a journey of discovery and a truly exciting and important work' Zainab Abbas Despite the best efforts of researchers and campaigners, there remains today a steadfast tendency to reduce the history of African and Caribbean people in Britain to a simple story: it is one that begins in 1948 with the arrival of a single ship, the Empire Windrush, and continues mostly apart from a distinct British history, overlapping only on occasion amid grotesque injustice or pioneering protest. Yet, as acclaimed historian Hakim Adi demonstrates, from the very beginning, from the moment humans first stood on this rainy isle, there have been African and Caribbean men and women set at Britain's heart. Libyan legionaries patrolled Hadrian's Wall while Rome's first 'African Emperor' died in York. In Elizabethan England, 'Black Tudors' served in the land's most eminent households while intrepid African explorers helped Sir Francis Drake to circumnavigate the globe. And, as Britain became a major colonial and commercial power, it was African and Caribbean people who led the radical struggle for freedom - a struggle which raged throughout the twentieth century and continues today in Black Lives Matter campaigns. Charting a course through British history with an unobscured view of the actions of African and Caribbean people, Adi reveals how much our greatest collective achievements - universal suffrage, our victory over fascism, the forging of the NHS - owe to these men and women, and how, in understanding our history in these terms, we are more able to fully understand our present moment.
Download or read book Cosmos and Psyche written by Richard Tarnas and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-01-19 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a philosopher whose magisterial history of Western thought was praised by Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith comes a brilliant new book that traces the connection between cosmic cycles and archetypal patterns of human experience. Drawing on years of research and on thinkers from Plato to Jung, Richard Tarnas explores the planetary correlations of epochal events like the French Revolution, the two world wars, and September 11. Whether read as astrology updated for the quantum age or as a contemporary classic of spirituality, Cosmos and Psyche is a work of immense sophistication, deep learning, and lasting importance.
