{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Knowledge Architects: Building Wisdom in the Information Age","title":"Episode 42 | The Encyclopedists","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1423,"description":"AI-generated audio: the two voices and their conversation in this episode are created by AI. The hosts are not real people.\nHow we make it: our team chooses each topic and edits the audio. The research and these notes are drafted with AI and read by us before publishing.\nWhy AI? It lets us bring peer-reviewed science to you for free, in English and German. Sources are below.\n\nEpisode Summary\n\nIn March 1759 the French King's Council explained why it was banning a book. Not because it was useless or full of errors, but because, once finished, it would be \"a complete dictionary and a general treatise of all the sciences\", and so \"far more sought after by the public and far more often consulted\". The work was dangerous because it would be useful. The book was the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert. What made a reference work so threatening?\nIn this episode we follow the Encyclopédie from a Paris bookseller's plan to translate an English dictionary, a plan that ended with the bookseller and his translator exchanging punches, to 28 folio volumes and about 74,000 articles published over 21 years. We look at how it organised knowledge: a famous tree of memory, reason and imagination, borrowed from Francis Bacon and quietly rearranged so that theology sat under reason; an alphabet that actually ordered the book; and some 61,700 cross-references that Diderot hoped could \"secretly overturn\" opinions nobody dared attack openly. The editors themselves called their tree partly arbitrary, one map among as many as there are projections of the globe. We ask who could actually afford it (a full set cost about 65 weeks of a skilled artisan's pay), what it said about crafts, authority, slavery and women, and why it was banned twice, condemned by the Pope and, most effectively, cut in secret by its own publisher. Then we follow its design to Britannica and Wikipedia, where the links can finally be counted, and most of them are rarely clicked.\n\nKey Topics...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/FqjMDaQUSm1bYfkwwD6aDUnSGdwLjCiheWhxBb00zow/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS84YjIz/YzkwMzlmNGM5YmEw/NTJkOGYyMTk0YTMw/ZWM0Zi5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}