Читать книгу Encyclopedic Liberty - Jean Le Rond d'Alembert - Страница 11
Оглавление[print edition page xl]
[print edition page xli]
The articles in this volume are drawn from the original twenty-eight-volume edition, the so-called first Paris folio, whose full title was Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société de gens de lettres. It was edited by Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert and published in Paris, in 1751–72, by Briasson, David, Le Breton, Durand. The eleven volumes of plates were produced from 1762 to 1772, while the seventeen volumes of text appeared from 1751 to 1765. All citations are from this edition, which is accessible online from the ARTFL database (Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language), a collaborative effort of the University of Chicago and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), at http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu. That website contains both a scanned electronic version of each entry and image links to a photographic reproduction of every page in the work.
The entries in this collection are arranged in alphabetical order by their original French titles. This has the advantage of presenting them in the chronological order in which they appeared off the press in the first edition.
Where it seemed necessary or appropriate, an entry that we have translated is introduced by a brief editorial note in italics. Within the text of an item that we have translated, we have used brackets for clarification, though sparingly. For the fifteen entries translated in whole or in part by others, we use brackets to indicate where we have completed the translation (if applicable). Any note that has been added to those offered by the original editor is followed by the initials HC. The 1751 Encyclopédie did not contain a great many footnotes; virtually all notes in the present volume are either by the present editor or by the translator of the article, and the few exceptions are clearly marked.
[print edition page xlii]
In using the 1751–65 edition, the aim has been to provide modern readers with as much of the experience of their eighteenth-century counterparts as possible. Toward that end, many of the features of the original publication have been duplicated. Perhaps the most important of these concerns the identification of contributors. Those authors who agreed to have identifying markers alongside their entries did so in various ways. In the early volumes, for example, there was a systematic effort to place an asterisk before the title of any article by Diderot, a practice adopted in this edition. There are other articles missing the asterisk but known to be by Diderot. For his part, Jaucourt’s articles are almost always signed, though in inconsistent ways: sometimes his name appears in full, other times only his initials in parentheses appear (D. J.), the latter being a method also deployed by Véron de Forbonnais (M. V.D.F.). For other authors, a one-letter code was developed; among those included in Encyclopedic Liberty are Boucher d’Argis (A), Mallet (G), and d’Alembert himself (O). Italics and capital letters are often used to set off the author identifications at the end of articles, and we follow that practice as well as the practice of citing article titles themselves in capital letters.
Because one of the pleasures of reading the Encyclopédie is to observe the subtle ways in which the editors and their collaborators were continually trying to outwit the censors, and because some authors were more willing to identify themselves to the public than others, we have chosen to preserve as much of this original apparatus as possible.
