Lethean
Posts: 292 Joined: Jan. 2014
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Quote (CeilingCat @ Nov. 01 2017,00:04) | KF continues to amaze. (This is in a Wikipedia bashing thread if you're wondering at Gordon's sudden interest in encyclopedias.) Quote | 56 kairosfocus October 31, 2017 at 4:36 am
F/N: A capital example of unintended irony in the cited article; regarding encyclopedias as reflecting and perhaps helping shape radical secularist agendas . . . while missing out the notorious evidence on where the case in point ended up:
In Europe, the quest to compile a modern encyclopedia started with the Enlightenment in the 18th century. (Immanuel Kant coined a fitting Latin motto for the movement: “Sapere aude,” or “Dare to know.”) French Enlightenment thinkers like Francis Bacon and Denis Diderot began compiling ambitious encyclopedias, inspiring others throughout France, Germany, England, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The religious ruling class’s discomfort with the effort only helped its financial feasibility; there was an obvious market for these massive collections, often published in numerous volumes, for an increasingly secular middle-class. The first volume of Encycopedie was sold in 1751 to 2,000 subscribers, who would go on to receive the entire twenty-eight-volume set. Notable revolutionary thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu were involved in the editing of the work and several even ended up in prison. Only 17 years after the publication of the last volume in 1772, the French revolution began, leading to perhaps the most secular state in human history.
That trend toward rationality and enlightenment was endangered long before the advent of the Internet.
I see you one French Revolution and raise you one guillotine. Multiply by a generation of expansionist wars under colours of liberty, equality, fraternity. Not to mention, modern Dictatorship as pioneered by Napoleon.
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Channeling his inner Gaulin there.
-------------- "So I'm a pretty unusual guy and it's not stupidity that has gotten me where I am. It's brilliance."
"My brain is one of the very few independent thinking brains that you've ever met. And that's a thing of wonder to you and since you don't understand it you criticize it."
~Dave Hawkins~
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