Propædia

The one-volume ''Propædia'' is the first of three parts of the 15th edition of ''Encyclopædia Britannica'', intended as a compendium and topical organization of the 12-volume '' Micropædia'' and the 17-volume '' Macropædia,'' which are organized alphabetically. Introduced in 1974 with the 15th edition, the ''Propædia'' and ''Micropædia'' were intended to replace the Index of the 14th edition; however, after widespread criticism, the ''Britannica'' restored the Index as a two-volume set in 1985. The core of the ''Propædia'' is its Outline of Knowledge, which seeks to provide a logical framework for all human knowledge. However, the ''Propædia'' also has several appendices listing the staff members, advisors and contributors to all three parts of the ''Britannica''.

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''Outline of Knowledge''

Like the ''Britannica'' as a whole, the ''Outline'' has three types of goals:
*Epistemological: to provide a systematic, hierarchical categorization of all human knowledge, a 20th-century analog of the Great Chain of Being and Francis Bacon's outline in '' Instauratio magna''.
* Educational: to lay out a course of study for each major discipline, a "roadmap" for learning a whole field.
* Organizational: to serve as an expanded Table of Contents for the '' Micropædia'' and '' Macropædia''.
According to Mortimer J. Adler, the designer of the ''Propaedia'', all articles in the full ''Britannica'' were designed to fit into the ''Outline of Knowledge''.

The ''Outline'' has ten Parts, each containing from 2 to 7 Divisions, which in turn contain from 2 to 11 sections. Each Part has an introductory essay, as listed below in the final column of Table 1, each of the ten essays written by the same individual responsible for developing the outline for that Part, which was done in consultation and collaboration with a handful of other scholars; in all, 86 men and one woman were involved in developing the Outline of Knowledge (see Table 2 below).

The ''Outline'' was an eight-year project of Mortimer J. Adler, published 22 years after he published a similar effort (the '' Syntopicon'') that attempts to provide an overview of the relationships among the "Great Ideas" in Adler's '' Great Books of the Western World'' series. (The Great Books were also published by the Encyclopædia Britannica Inc.) Adler stresses in his book, ''A Guidebook to Learning: For a Lifelong Pursuit of Wisdom'', that the ten categories should not be taken as hierarchical but as circular.

Similar works

Other encyclopedias have provided analogous outlines of knowledge. In the Preface to the famous ''Encyclopédie'' (published 1751–1772), d'Alembert provides a roadmap to the knowledge of his time. Inspired by that example, in a letter dated 15 November 1812, Dugald Stewart proposed to Archibald Constable, the owner and publisher of the ''Britannica'', that the supplement to its 5th edition should begin with a series of dissertations that outlined and organized the knowledge of their time.

Contributors to the ''Outline of Knowledge''

See also

* History of the ''Encyclopædia Britannica''
* Propaedeutics
* Threshold knowledge

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Propaedia
Encyclopædia Britannica
Indexes