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.
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.
This work reads more akin to a Weberian approach, a la his analysis of the ideal-types of social action, or the work of Diderot and
the Encyclopedists, rather than approaching its topic in a manner closer to Merleau-Ponty or Schutz.
The true one was, in his opinion, first theorized by John Locke and then further developed in the papers of Josiah Tucker, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, whereas the false one was frequently used by physiocrats,
the Encyclopedists (11) and J.
The Enlightenment started in France, where Voltaire (1694-1778) and
the Encyclopedists were its major proponents.
Matfre clearly did not take such a view; his Breviari constituted an unprecedented attempt to wed the highly allusive and formally complex love poetry of the troubadours to the exhaustive but prosaic erudition of
the encyclopedists, partly through direct quotations of the lyric.
Sanbonmatsu (2004) adds: In the dreams of modern reason, from
the Encyclopedists and Jacobins in the eighteenth century to the socialists and anarchists of the nineteenth and twentieth, the Tower of Babel would be rebuilt, the whole restored.
(88) Precisely the same sense of the utility of creation underlies the work of
the encyclopedists. Building upon Paul's comment, for instance, Bartholomaeus Anglicus prefaces his On the Properties of Things by remarking that it is only possible for the human mind to be led to the contemplation of the immaterial celestial hierarchy through material things.