> Damn dumb kids.
>
If the internet is like a public library and in the past people
settled disputes by going to the library to find information, then
this current generation coming up is going to be very intelligent. I
have noticed a good proportion of X'ers who still continue the
computer/nerd not/computer person stereotype. X like Boomer has some
real dumb asses who refuse to use the new tools, plain ignorant fools.
But these new kids have no such info/prejudace and all use these
intelligent tools. I would wager that the millennials are gonna smoke
all generations before then when those generations learn how to gage
the effects of this information/library/wiki thingy. It wll be like
the invention and emergence of the encyclopedia which cause a
massively leterate population in love which reading.
An encyclopedia, encyclopaedia or (traditionally) encyclopaedia, is a
comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all
branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge.
...The "Encyclopédie" was edited by Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Denis
Diderot and published in 17 volumes of articles, issued from 1751 to
1765, and 11 volumes of illustrations, issued from 1762 to 1772. Five
volumes of supplementary material and a two volume index, supervised
by other editors, were issued from 1776 to 1780 by Charles Joseph
Panckoucke.
Realizing the inherent problems with the model of knowledge he had
created, Diderot's view of his own success in writing the
"Encyclopédie" were far from ecstatic. Diderot envisioned the perfect
encyclopedia as more than the sum of its parts. In his own article on
the encyclopedia, Diderot wrote, "Were an analytical dictionary of the
sciences and arts nothing more than a methodical combination of their
elements, I would still ask whom it behooves to fabricate good
elements." Diderot viewed the ideal encyclopedia as an index of
connections. He realized that all knowledge could never be amassed in
one work, but he hoped the relations between subjects could.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Diderot
Denis Diderot (1713-84) undertook the bulk of the editorial work and
the composition of many articles. He was assisted by the mathematician
and philosopher Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717-83) and its many
anonymous contributors included Voltaire, Montesquieu, Turgot,
Condillac, and Rousseau. Under Diderot's editorship, 17 volumes of
text and 11 of plates were published between 1751 and 1772.
At its completion, it consisted of 35 volumes of text, plates, and
indices.
The Encyclopedia was intended
as a compendium of all valuable
knowledge and as a guide to the
interdependence of the various
disciplines and spheres of
enquiry and technology.
Philosophically, the work was indebted to the empiricist tradition of
Bacon and Locke. More than just a source of information, the
Encyclopedia was intended to provide an education in enlightened
reason as many of its articles expressed by example, aside,
comparison, or in their tone an ethos critical of religious and
political tradition. In this sense,
it was a secularizing and
politically critical work.
This was not missed either by the Church or by the state censors. In
1759, the Encyclopedia was placed on the Papal Index of Forbidden
Books and banned from publication by the French censor.
Thanks to a benign period of state censorship shortly thereafter,
publication was only delayed.
Politically, the Encyclopedia reflects the aspirations and attitudes
of the urban bourgeoisie, the "Third Estate," whose representatives
were, in 1789, to initiate the revolutionary defiance of Church and
Nobility.
http://www.etss.edu/hts/hts3/info5.htm
[G] - The Encyclopedia & the Philosophic Dictionary
The popularity of so irreverent a book as Candide gives us some sense
of the spirit of the age. The lordly culture of Louis XIV's time,
despite the massive bishops who spoke so eloquent a part in it, had
learned to smile at dogma and tradition. The failure of the
Reformation to capture France had left for Frenchmen no half-way house
between infallibility and infidelity; and while the intellect of
Germany and England moved leisurely in the lines of religious
evolution, the mind of France leaped from the hot faith which had
massacred the Huguenots to the cold hostility with which La Mettrie,
Helvetius, Holbach and Diderot turned upon the religion of their
fathers. Let us look for a moment at the intellectual environment in
which the later Voltaire moved and had his being.
La Mettrie (1709-51) was an army physician who had lost his post by
writing a Natural History of the Soul, and had won exile by a work
called Man a Machine. He had taken refuge at the court of Frederick,
who was himself something of an advanced thinker and was resolved to
have the very latest culture from Paris. La Mettrie took up the idea
of mechanism where the frightened Descartes, like a boy who has burned
his fingers, had dropped it; and announced boldly that all the world,
not excepting man, was a machine. The soul is material, and matter is
soulful; but whatever they are they act upon each other, and grow and
decay with each other in a way that leaves no doubt of their essential
similarity and interdependence. If the soul is pure spirit, how can
enthusiasm warm the body, or fever in the body disturb the processes
of the mind? All organisms have evolved out of one original germ,
through the reciprocal action of organism and environment. The reason
why animals have intelligence, and plants none, is that animals move
about for their food, while plants take what comes to them. Man has
the highest intelligence because he has the greatest wants and the
widest mobility; "beings without wants are also without mind."
Though La Mettie was exiled for these opinions, Helvetius (1715-71),
who took them as the basis of his book On Man, became one of the
richest men in France, and rose to position and honor. Here we have
the ethic, as in La Mettrie the metaphysic, of atheism. All action is
dictated by egoism, self-love; "even the hero follows the feeling
which for him is associated with the greatest pleasure"; and "virtue
is egoism furnished with a spy-glass." Conscience is not the voice of
God, but the fear of the police; it is the deposit left in us from the
stream of prohibitions poured over the growing soul by parents and
teachers and press. Morality must be founded not on theology but on
sociology; the changing needs of society, and not any unchanging
revelation or dogma, must determine the good.
The greatest figure in this group was Denis Diderot (1713-84). His
ideas were expressed in various fragments from his own pen, and in the
System of Nature of Baron d'Holbach (1723-89), whose salon was the
centre of Diderot's circle. "If we go back to the beginning," says
Holbach, "we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that
fancy, enthusiasm or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness
worships them; that credulity preserves them; and that custom respects
and tyranny supports them in order to make the blindness of men serve
its own interests." Belief in God, said Diderot, is bound up with
submission to autocracy; the two rise and fall together; and "men will
never be free till the last king is strangled with the entrails of the
last priest." The earth will come into its own only when heaven is
destroyed. Materialism may be an over-simplification of the world-all
matter is probably instinct with life, and it is impossible to reduce
the unity of consciousness to matter and motion; but materialism is a
good weapon against the Church, and must be used till a better one is
found. Meanwhile one must spread knowledge and encourage industry;
industry will make for peace, and knowledge will make a new and
natural morality.
These are the ideas which Diderot and d'Alembert labored to
disseminate through the great Encyclopedic which they issued, volume
by volume, from 1752 to 1772. The Church had the first volumes
suppressed; and, as the opposition increased, Diderot's comrades
abandoned him; but he worked on angrily, invigorated by his rage. "I
know nothing so indecent," he said, "as these vague declamations of
the theologians against reason. To hear them one would suppose that
men could not enter inter the bosom of Christianity except as a herd
of cattle enters a stable." It was, as Paine put it, the age of
reason; these men never doubted that the intellect was the ultimate
human test of all truth and all good. Let reason be freed, they said,
and it would in a few generations build Utopia. Diderot did not
suspect that the erotic and neurotic Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78),
whom he had just introduced to Paris, was carrying in his head, or in
his heart, the seeds of a revolution against this enthronement of
reason; a revolution which, armed with the impressive obscurities of
Immanuel Kant, would soon capture every citadel of philosophy.
Naturally enough, Voltaire, who was interested in everything, and had
a hand in every fight, was caught up for a time in the circle of the
Encyclopedists; they were glad to call him their leader; and he was
not averse to their incense, though some of their ideas needed a
little pruning. They asked him to write articles for their great
undertaking, and he responded with a facility and fertility which
delighted them. When he had finished this work he set about making an
encyclopedia of his own, which he called a Philosophic Dictionary;
with unprecedented audacity he took subject after subject as the
alphabet suggested them, and poured out under each heading part of his
inexhaustible resources of knowledge and wisdom. Imagine a man writing
on everything, and producing a classic none the less; the most
readable and sparkling of Voltaire's works aside from his romances;
every article a model of brevity, clarity, and wit. "Some men can be
prolix in one small volume; Voltaire is terse through a hundred." Here
at last Voltaire proves that he is a philosopher.
He begins, like Bacon, Descartes and Locke and all the moderns, with
doubt and a (supposedly) clean slate. "I have taken as my patron saint
St. Thomas of Didymus, who always insisted on an examination with his
own hands." He thanks Bayle for having taught him the art of doubt. He
rejects all systems, and suspects that "every chief of a sect in
philosophy has been a little of a quack." "The further I go, the more
I am confirmed in the idea that systems of metaphysics are for
philosophers what novels are for women." It is only charlatans who are
certain. We know nothing of first principles. It is truly extravagant
to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God formed
the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will. Doubt is
not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one." "I do
not know how I was made, and how I was born. I did not know at all,
during a quarter of my life, the causes of what I saw, or heard, or
felt. ... I have seen that which is called matter, both as the star
Sirius, and as the smallest atom which can be perceived with the
microscope; and I do not know what this matter is."
...Even if Philosophy should end in the total doubt of Montaigne's
"Que sais-je?" it is man's greatest adventure, and his noblest. Let us
learn to be content with modest advances in knowledge, rather than be
forever weaving new systems out of our mendacious imagination.
We must not say, Let us begin by inventing principles whereby we may
be able to explain everything; rather we must say, Let us make an
exact analysis of the matter, and then we shall try to see, with much
diffidence, if it fits in with any principle. . . . The Chancellor
Bacon had shown the road which science might follow. . . . But then
Descartes appeared and did just the contrary of what he should have
done: instead of studying nature, he wished to divine her. . . . This
best of mathematicians made only romances in philosophy. ... It is
given us to calculate, to weigh, to measure, to observe; this is
natural philosophy; almost all the rest is chimera.
The Story of Philosophy
by WILL DURANT
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671739166/
...[The] Royal Society which was to become the greatest association of
scientists in the world, named Bacon as their model and inspiration;
they hoped that this organization of English research would lead the
way toward that Europe-wide association which the Advancement of
Learning had taught them to desire. And when the great minds of the
French Enlightenment undertook that masterpiece of intellectual
enterprise, the Encyclopedie, they dedicated it to Francis Bacon.
"If," said Diderot in the Prospectus, "we have come of it
successfully, we shall owe most to the Chancellor Bacon, who threw out
the plan of an universal dictionary of sciences and arts, at a time
when, so to say, neither arts nor sciences existed.
The Story of Philosophy
by WILL DURANT
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671739166/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%%C3%%A9die
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire
http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/diderot.htm
