The interdependence of orders of knowlegde and normative orders can be traced particularly well for networks surrounding the Encyclopédie edited by Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert. In a social world and a culture of knowledge still strongly shaped by the clerus and an authoritarian government, the ‘encyclopedic order' offers a revolutionary project of a knowledge system that seeks to shape a new normative order for society, both implicitly through its medial structure and explicitly through its cognitive content. At the same time this project rests on a growing body of scientific knowledge whose cultural power was strongly increasing at the time.
In its first phase the research project concentrates on texts of Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783), and especially on the order of knowledge and its socio-political implications first layed out in d'Alembert's Discours Préliminaire de l'Encyclopédie (1751) and finally presented in his Essai sur les Elémens de Philosophie (1759). In the German speaking area, most of d'Alembert's philosophical writings were appreciated only very rarely. Therefore one of the results of our research project will be the first translation and German edition of the Essai sur les Elémens de Philosophie.
