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In an essay on Huffington Post titled “The Godfather of All Encyclopedias,” President Joan Hinde Stewart wrote about “one of the greatest of the Enlightenment philosophers, Denis Diderot,” and the “dazzlingly original series of works that range in their subject matter from religion to science and morality” that are his legacy. Published on Oct. 7, two days after the 300th anniversary of Diderot’s birth, Stewart’s article focused primarily on his “the awesome Encyclopédie.”

Describing it as “the godfather of all modern encyclopedias,” Stewart wrote, “It is impossible to convey in just a few words the vastness of the enterprise or the depth of information that the Encyclopédie presents in its more than 70,000 entries. … Ever since its publication, the Encyclopédie has been pored over by scholars in search of data, method and information about myriad categories of knowledge disseminated (and often hidden) in its thousands of pages. Diderot's way of thinking was new; his scholarly ambition was staggering; his method was the model of scrupulous research.”
 

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