The Creation of Encyclopedia

The Creation of Encyclopedia

Webster's New World Dictionary defines the Enlightenment as "an 18th-century European philosophical movement characterized by rationalism, an impetus toward learning, and a spirit of skepticism and empiricism in social and political thought." During this period of enlightenment, the way the world was viewed changed in a large part because of the group of philosophers known as the philosophes. During the Enlightenment the greatest philosophical movement of the philosophes was the creation of the Encylopedie ou Dicionnaire raisonne des sciences des arts et des métiers, or in English; the rational dictionary of the sciences, the arts and the crafts, otherwise known as the Encyclopedia.

The philosophe's encyclopedia is regarded so highly because it brought about a new way of thinking, an enlightened way of thinking. The encyclopedia, according to the Electric Library, dates back to Aristotle and his attempts at compiling large amounts of information. Other encyclopedia's were written after Aristotle's attempt, including one that was published just a few years before the philosophe's Encyclopedia, the Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia. (1) According to the Denis Diderot History web page, the Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia was the inspiration for the philosophe's Encyclopedia. The intention was to create a French translation of the Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia, but when Denis Diderot was hired as editor, the outlook of the Encyclopedia changed. Diderot did not want a mere translation; instead he wanted an encyclopedia that would

"enlighten and explain every aspect of existence." (1)

Denis Diderot and another editor, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, a noted scientist and mathematician, started working on the Encyclopedia in 1745. Among the many responsibilities of creating such a big compilation of knowledge, was finding authors to write the Encyclopedia. To accomplish this task, Diderot and d'Alembert employed the services of some of the greatest minds of the time: people like Voltaire, Turgot, Quesnay, d'Holbach, Montesquieu, Buffon, and Rousseau. Robert Morrissey summed up the philosophes efforts by saying that, "these great minds (and some lesser ones) collaborated in the goal of assembling and disseminating in clear, accessible prose the fruits of accumulated knowledge and learning." (2)

The Encyclopedia itself consists of seventeen volumes with a total of roughly 72,000 articles and 16,500 pages. According to Morrisey, "the typical article includes the head word, its part of speech and gender, the category of knowledge to which the article belongs (e.