Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, "Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge."

One thing that this essay should teach you is that, in history as probably in every other discipline, reading requires research. You will not understand this essay unless you are familiar with the following terms: epistimology, morphology, ontology, metaphysics, mappemonde, non sequitur, scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas, Summa. Many, maybe even most, of you may have never encountered these words (or others in the essay) before. To understand the essay you need to look up these words in a dictionary or in an enyclopedia. That is, in part, what it means to be a university student: the challenge and joy of it.

Another thing the essay will teach you about history is the importance of knowing other languages. Darnton uses several French terms. That should not suprprise us because he writes about French history. As residents and citizens of Canada, whose official languages are English and French, we welcome the opportunity of reading and understanding a few words in French. If we do not understand them, we turn to research again by looking them up in a French-English dictionary. As historians we are always researchers.

1. What is the Encyclopédie? Who were d'Alembert and Diderot? What was their connection to the Encyclopédie?

2. Compare the classification of knowledge in the Encyclopédie with that of Chambers and Bacon by reading the essay and examining the Appendix. Was the classifcatory system in the Encyclopédie essentially the same as or different from Chambers and Bacon?

3. How / why does the Encyclopédie belong to the Enlightenment?

4. Would you call the Encyclopédie a subversive enterprise? Did it threaten what Robin Briggs calls "the ancien régime of kings, nobles, and priests"? In other words, did the Encyclopédie challenge the social order of early modern Europe?