Word: diderot
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...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...
...Diderot of the dirty joke that Legman will be best remembered, although Rationale contains enough ravings against the inauthenticities of popular culture to earn him another title -the Carrie Nation of kitsch. He is also the Joe McCarthy of heterosexuality who looks for gays under every bed, a man who professes to love woman but whose opinions reveal a lover of the Vic torian idea of Woman, and a Jeremiah who sees the world ending in nuclear war or a fecal flood of pollution...
...evokes an idyllic time before mass communications and technology. Vol taire and Diderot could keep abreast by keeping in touch with each other and with a few other members of the elite. The vast majority of the people could get the word, eventually and in some manner, from the local tavern keeper or cure. Anyway they did not need to know very much, the Harris the sis seems to suggest, being somehow mystically in touch with nature and eternity. Perhaps Harris' real target is uni versal literacy...
...deny that view the protection of the first amendment. The first amendment was designed precisely to avoid that kind of tyrannical usurpation of unpopular minority views. The history of ideas is replete with examples of unpopular views which later proved to have value: the views of Jesus, Copernicus, Luther, Diderot, Darwin, Marx and Freud, to name just a few, met considerable resistance, not to mention censorship, at their inception. Whether or not there proves to be any value in pornography's view, it is not the business of our courts, in principle, to regulate the flow of ideas--only...