Word: diderot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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French Philosopher Denis Diderot had the intellectual brilliance that sparkled in an 18th century drawing room, but he sometimes found less conventional ways to display his native gifts. When a lady painter who was doing his portrait objected that his clothes hid his neck, the eminent thinker silently retired behind a curtain and reappeared a moment later "as naked as a worm...
Dieckmann will also be chairman of the department. He is a leading authority on French language and literature and has studied the works of Diderot throughout his career...
...discovery of the manuscripts of Diderot in 1948, in an old castle in Normandy was one of the important scholarly finds of recent times...
Adler is already off on his next great project, which, if he succeeds, will make the Syntopicon look like an exam pony. Adler wants to summarize all the knowledge of the Western world in one vast work, comparable to Aquinas' 13th century Summa or Diderot's 18th century Encyclopaedia. His aim: to help end the Babel of Western civilization, in which specialists in various fields not only disagree but cannot even argue with each other in the same language. He does not want to reach conclusions, but simply clear the decks for "some future philosophic genius" by summing...
...Alembert wrote on mathematics, Turgot on economics, Quesnay on agriculture, Buffon on nature, Rousseau on music, and Montesquieu on taste. Diderot himself wrote on everything from intolerance and Spinoza to anagrams and onomancy-the "science" of telling a man's fortune by the letters in his name. He treated topics that intellectuals had been apt to ignore before. He spent hours studying iron foundries and gunpowder mills at first hand, imported workers from the factories of Lyons to help him with an article on the velvet trade...