Name: 【TED-Ed】The controversial origins of the Encyclopedia - Addison Anderson
Uploaded: 2016-04-22T05:30:26.000Z
Duration: 5 min 21 s
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Denis Diderot left a dungeon outside Paris on November 3, 1749.

He'd had his writing  burned in public before,

but this time, he'd gotten locked up under royal order

for an essay about a philosopher's death bed rejection of God.

To free himself, Denis promised never to write things like that again.

So he got back to work  on something a little like that,

In 1745, publisher André le Breton had hired Diderot

or a universal dictionary  of arts and sciences

A broke writer, Diderot survived by translating,

Le Breton paired him with co-editor Jean le Rond d'Alembert,

a math genius found  on a church doorstep as a baby.

Technical dictionaries,  like the cyclopedia, weren't new,

but no one had attempted one publication covering all knowledge,

The two men organized  the French Enlightenment's brightest stars

or rational dictionary of the arts, sciences, and crafts.

Assembling every essential fact and principle in, as it turned out,

created over three decades of researching,

Diderot adapted Francis Bacon's "Classification of Knowledge"

into a three-part system based  on the mind's approaches to reality:

He also emphasized the importance of commerce,

poking around shops to study the tools and techniques of Parisian laborers.

To spotlight a few of the nearly 150 philosophical contributors,

Jean Jacques Rousseau, Diderot's close friend,

wrote much of the music section  in three months,

His entry on political economy holds ideas he'd later develop further

D'Alembert wrote  the famous preliminary discourse,

a key statement  of the French Enlightenment,

championing independent  investigative reasoning

Louis de Jaucourt wrote a quarter of the encyclopedia,

Louis once spent 20 years writing a book on anatomy,

shipped it to Amsterdam  to be published uncensored,

Diderot's entries sometimes  exhibit slight bias.

In "political authority," he dismantled the divine right of kings.

he argued a state was strongest  without great disparity in wealth.

Not surprising from the guy who wrote poetry about mankind strangling its kings

So Diderot's masterpiece wasn't a hit with the king or highest priest.

Louie XV banned the whole thing but enjoyed his own copy.

But Diderot kept a step ahead of being shut down,

smuggling proofs outside France for publication,

and getting help from allies in the French Regime,

including the King's mistress, Madame de Pompadour,

and the royal librarian and censor, Malesherbes,

who tipped Diderot off to impending raids,

and even hid Diderot's papers at his dad's house.

Rousseau broke off his friendship over a line in a play.

Worse yet, his publisher secretly edited some proofs

The uncensored pages reappeared  in Russia in 1933,

long after Diderot had considered the work finished

The encyclopedia he left behind is many things:

a testament  to France's crisis of authority,

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【TED-Ed】The controversial origins of the Encyclopedia - Addison Anderson

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authority

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