Title
The Logic of the Invisible: Perceiving the Submarine World in French Enlightenment Geography
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2019
Department
French
Language
English
Publication Title
The Aesthetics of the Undersea
Abstract
In the "Preliminary Discourse" (1751) of the French Enlightenment Encyclopedia, or Reasoned Dictionary of Sciences, Arts and Crafts, the mathematician Jean D"Alembert described the organization of disciplines as "a kind of map of the world." Each article was like a single country, presumed to be linked geographically and culturally to others, but these links could be difficult to perceive. What obscured them was likened to the ocean: "The Universe is nothing but a vast Ocean, upon the surface of which we perceive ... islands, some bigger, some smaller, whose link to the continent is hidden from us." To create the map of disciplines, seemingly arbitrary islands of knowledge had to be placed within a larger network, but the ocean blurred the pathways that connected them.
Recommended Citation
Roman, Hanna. "The Logic of the Invisible: Perceiving the Submarine World in French Enlightenment Geography." In The Aesthetics of the Undersea, edited by Margaret Cohen and Killian Quigley, 42-53. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2019.
Comments
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