Word: britannicas
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...invent the Encyclopaedia Britannica today, would you do it the same way? That was the question posed in 1957 to members of the Board of Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Now-17 years and $32 million later-the editors have disclosed their answer: No. The new 15th edition, which was unveiled at a press conference in Manhattan this week, is heralded as "the first new idea in encyclopaedia making in 200 years...
...editors decided that an alphabetical collection of unrelated articles -the traditional Britannica format since the first edition in 1771-was no longer adequate in an era of explosive growth in human knowledge. What was needed was a completely new design that would permit continual additions and changes, and at the same time satisfy more effectively the three separate needs of Britannica users: 1) to get at the facts, or a single fact, quickly and easily; 2) to discover the meaning of the facts; and 3) to review entire fields of learning...
Three Parts. The solution was provided by Britannica Editor and Author Mortimer Adler, founder-president of the Institute for Philosophical Research, a man who has never been intimidated by the task of organizing and compiling the total of human knowledge. His 1952 Syntopticon, an index to EB's 54-volume Great Books of the Western World, catalogued everything of note the authors had to say about the 102 Great Ideas of Western Civilization. Adler divided the encyclopaedia into three separate parts, which he named with the pseudoclassic neologisms: the Propaedia, Macropaedia and Micropaedia (meaning before, great and little learning...
...unique part of Britannica 3 (estimated price: $550) is the Propaedia, a one-volume "outline of the whole of human knowledge" that serves as a framework and guide for the material in the other 29 volumes. The concept of the Propaedia stems from the Greek words that constitute the term encyclopaedia: the whole circle (or complete system) of learning. Adler describes the content of the Propaedia as a "circle of learning" that is divided, pie-like, into ten major segments: matter and energy, the earth, life on earth, human life, human society, art, technology, religion, the history of mankind...
...rest," she jokes-and she still writes about the women's movement, which she has been involved in since her teens. Her advocacy of women's rights has not lessened over the years, and she wrote an essay, "Woman, a Technological Castaway," for the 1973 Encyclopaedia Britannica Yearbook. "In every marriage there are two marriages," she wrote. "His and hers. His is better . . . What man now calls woman's natural feminine mentality is the unnatural slave mentality he forced on her, just as he forced it on the blacks. He made her the 'house nigger...