Word: diderot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This fixation on truth and nature endeared him to advanced thinkers in France, especially to Denis Diderot, compiler of the monumental Encyclopedia. "It is the chief business of art," Diderot declared in 1765, "to touch and to move, and to do this by getting close to nature." Chardin, Diderot said, epitomized that ambition at work: "Welcome back, great magician, with your mute compositions! How eloquently they speak to the artist! How much they tell him about the representation of nature, the science of color and harmony! How freely the air flows around these objects!" Few painters have ever had such...
This patient construction, this sense of the intrinsic worth of seeing, combines with Chardin's second gift: his remarkable feeling for the poetic (rather than didactic) moments of human gesture. It permeates his genre scenes and portraits, especially the portraits of children; the gentle muteness that Diderot perceived often turns into a noble ineloquence, as though Piero della Francesca were visiting the nursery. In some way Chardin's absorption in the act of painting paralleled the absorption of children in their games, which he painted. One has only to look at the figure in his portrait Little Girl...
...from the classroom any teacher who is not 'alive.' A teacher of language should be in total command of the language, but he should also be a firebrand and an actor." That perfectly describes Rassias himself. For an upper-class lecture on the 18th century French philosopher Diderot, Rassias shows up in class in a blond wig, breeches and billowing shirt and proceeds to act out the emotional states that Diderot argued are unique to man. Rage, for instance, is depicted by heaving a chair across the room. Says Rassias: "If you want to teach, you have...
...Smellie, who was only 28 but had an expertise ranging from Terence to botany. Together with Macfarquhar, he worked out a new plan for an encyclopedia. He would follow the scheme most recently used by French Encyclopedist Denis Diderot?providing long articles on the arts and sciences, but without Diderot's polemical tone; and he would combine these long articles with brief alphabetical listings, as in the current British encyclopedias...
Samuel Johnson's two-volume dictionary was published in 1755, just four years after the first volume of Denis Diderot's Encyclopedic, that great compendium of information and Enlightenment opinion, had appeared in Paris. The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica began appearing in Edinburgh in 1768. The colonists knew and valued these works; indeed, I'Encyclopédie was among the most popular of all the books imported for colonial libraries. Information was instrumental to human happiness; education was meant to serve progress and political stability; and news, after all, was only one category of information...