Charles-Joseph Panckoucke
(1736–98) French publisher and bookseller.Beginning his career in Lille, where his father was a printer and publisher, he moved to Paris in 1762, soon becoming the wealthiest and most ...
Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes
(1721–1794), French administrator, royal minister, and Louis XVI's lawyer during the Revolution. Born into an important noble family of jurists who served in the parlement of Paris, Malesherbes was ...
cities
A large, densely populated urban settlement, larger than a town, which can include two or more independent administrative districts within it and usually has suburbs.
Encyclopédie Reference library
The Oxford Companion to the Book
Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers was published between 1751 and 1772 in 28 ...
Encyclopédie Reference library
Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment
During the third quarter of the eighteenth century, European publishers and editors persuaded an expanding readership that the most comprehensive
Encyclopédie Reference library
Johnson Kent Wright
The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World
The eighteenth century saw the birth of the encyclopedia in its modern form. But of the fifty or so published in that era, one towers above all the rest—the ...
Enlightenment
[CP]The period from the last part of the 17th century through the 18th century when many important philosophical and scientific developments took place, some of which stimulated a new interest in the ...
Helvétius
(1715–71)One of the moving spirits behind the Encyclopédie, Helvétius defended a theory of human motivation founded on sensation: we are pushed to action solely by self-interested love of pleasure ...
Jacques-André Naigeon
(1738–1810).Atheist philosophe, forthright rather than subtle. He wrote for the Encyclopédie and reworked subversive manuscripts for Holbach's anti‐religious campaign. Later he produced the first ...
Jacques-Georges de Chauffepié
(1702–1786), pastor, Christian apologist, and author of a biographical dictionary, intended to supplement Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique. Jacques-Georges de Chauffepié (or Chaufepié) was ...
Jaucourt, Louis,
Chevalier de (1704–1780), French encyclopedist, physician, and scholar. Born in Paris of feudal Protestant nobility, who had recently converted to Roman Catholicism, Jaucourt was educated in Geneva, ...
Jean-Martin de Prades
(1724–1782), controversial French clergyman and onetime collaborator on the Encyclopédie. Born in 1724 in Castelsarrasin, into an old noble family of southwestern France, Prades moved to Paris in ...
Montesquieu
Charles, Second Baron of Brede and Montesquieu (1689–1755), French philosopher and jurist. Montesquieu studied Locke while in England and returned to France to write about the British Constitution, ...
Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger
(1722–1759), French encyclopedist and philosopher. Boulanger was born on 11 November 1722. It could hardly be said that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. His origins ...
nominalism
(as opposed to Realism), the view of those Scholastics and later philosophers who regarded universals or abstract conceptions as a ‘flatus vocis’, mere names without any corresponding reality.
philosophes
French 18th-century philosophers of the Enlightenment: Rousseau, Condillac, Voltaire, and the other encyclopedists. See Encyclopédie.
progress
The idea of progress, conceived as the increasing sophistication of knowledge and the improving quality of life, has been the driving force of Western civilization for at least three hundred years. ...
Publishing
The activity of mass producing and disseminating information either via the medium of print, or electronically on the internet.
Representations of Reading
In the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, two entries by Louis Jaucourt define the reader and reading. The article “Lecteur,” after a neutral definition of a ...
Republic of Letters
The collective body of those engaged in literary pursuits. The expression occurs first in Addison's Dialogues upon Ancient Medals (i. 19).
