商品簡介
Stalnaker (French and romance philology, Columbia University) takes the descriptive style of the French Enlightenment compilers of natural history, such as Buffon, Daubenton and Saint-Pierre, and considers it in the light of shifts in methods of ordering knowledge. She also discusses the poetry that reflects the same desire to describe and systematize in literature. She argues that description was central to the discourse of the time. She then examines the work of the early encyclopedists, Diderot and d'Alembert. The last section of this study shows how the belief in being able to encompass everything in one set of volumes was shattered during the French Revolution with the epistemological change in perspectives. She believes, however, that with the recent ability to access complete works with their long descriptive passages, scholars will be able to better comprehend the motivation of the Enlightenment describers and, perhaps, revise their own epistemologies as a result. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
