Every generation's
encyclopedists face adversaries -- in the 18th century, Denis Diderot and other authors of the Encyclopdie were denounced as heretics -- and today's Wikipedians confront serious challenges: an often hostile editing environment with regular editors who "bite" the newbies, a long-term decline in the contributor community, bad actors who hack administrator accounts to vandalise pages, and an overall systemic bias in its coverage, caused in part by a contributor base that's mostly Western and male.
The
Encyclopedists, among others, were attracted to Italian music in part because its simple motor rhythms and drum basses were more successful in projecting a beat and keeping the ensemble together.
Howard also discusses Rameau's debate with the
Encyclopedists Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, Denis Diderot, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Nor is there much of the Enlightenment present as promised by the title, perhaps unsurprisingly given the
Encyclopedists' scepticism towards organised religion.
D'Alembert, Diderot, Grimm, Voltaire, all the French
encyclopedists vied with each other in trumpeting abroad the achievements of those enlightened despots who were inspired with the loftiest motives in "partaking of the Eucharistic body of Poland."
Kloppenberg terribly overstates when he argues that Locke's "reasonable" Christianity is "an only slightly modified version of his father's strict Puritan faith." Locke, after all, had an immense influence on the French
encyclopedists whose materialism and moral relativism helped pave the way for the French Revolution.
This is even an enjoyable read for anyone ready for a different and fresh approach to traversing Homer's "wine-dark seas" and other Greek epics as well as encounters with Herodotus and
encyclopedists such as Theophrastus and Pliny.
The outrageous ambition of Miller's texts is both in the attempt to include everything, but also to create a universe where one moves in and out of the imaginations of Gauguin, Van Gogh, and the
encyclopedists. His linguistic fetishization of the exotic, the other and the strange is well provided for in this culture of hungry acquisition, collection, and cataloguing.
Voltaire, the French
Encyclopedists, Condorcet, Comte, and German naturalists like Goethe, tried to discover a science-based substitute for religion.
The entire series earned a spot on our 101 Great Jewish Books list; Matthew Fishbane described it as "a cosmological multitome text about a vast plan to shorten a coming intergalactic 30,000-year dark age to a mere millennium, thanks to a secluded priesthood of '
Encyclopedists' tasked with preserving all human knowledge.
This biblical fact was corroborated by Plato, Aristotle, and their Roman redactors, Seneca and Pliny, as well as by most medieval
encyclopedists, who agreed that water circulated within the earth through underground passages that purged sea water of its salinity.