西方文化入门EconomicandPhilosophicalThinkersintheEnlightenment.docVIP

2010年西方文化入门(Handout 13) Economic and Philosophical Thinkers in the Enlightenment December, 2010 Part I The Encyclopedia The mid-century witnessed the publication of the Encyclopedia, one of the greatest monuments of the Enlightenment and its most monumental undertaking in the realm of print culture. Under the heroic leadership of Denis Diderot (1713-1784), and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, the first volume appeared in 1751. Eventually, numbering seventeen volumes of text and eleven of plates (illustrations), the project was completed in 1772. The Encyclopedia, in part a collective plea for freedom of expression, reached fruition only after many attempts to censor it and to halt its publication. It was the product of the collective effort of more than 100 authors, and its editors had at one time or another solicited articles from all the major French philosophes. It included the most advanced critical ideas of the time on religion, government, and philosophy. To avoid official censure, these ideas often had to be hidden in obscure articles or under the cover of irony. The Encyclopedia also included important articles and illustrations on manufacturing, canal building, ship construction, and improved agriculture, making it an important source of knowledge about eighteenth-century social and economic life. Between 14, 000 and 16,000 copies of various editions of the Encyclopedia were sold before 1789. The project had been designed to secularize learning and undermine intellectual assumptions that lingered from the Middle Ages and the Reformation. The articles on politics, ethics and society ignored divine law and concentrated on humanity and its immediate well-being. The Encyclopedists looked to antiquity rather than to the Christian centuries for their intellectual and ethical models. For them, the future welfare of humankind lay not in pleasing God or following divine commandments, but rather in harnessing the power and t