A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 01
⚠️ Content warning
- Language:
- English
- Translation:
- William F. Fleming
- Status:
- Selection or partial work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~84,600 words · 402 passages
Cite this work
- APAVoltaire. (n.d.). A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 01 (William F. Fleming, Trans.). Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/voltaire/a-philosophical-dictionary-volume-01
- MLAVoltaire. A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 01. Translated by William F. Fleming. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/voltaire/a-philosophical-dictionary-volume-01.
- ChicagoVoltaire. A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 01. Translated by William F. Fleming. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/voltaire/a-philosophical-dictionary-volume-01.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
Volume 1 of ten of the Philosophical Dictionary. A – Aristotle. It opens with the articles on the abbé, the soul and love.
Context and history
The form is the argument: a dictionary is consulted rather than read through, which made it impossible to refute as a whole and easy to circulate underground. Voltaire published it anonymously in 1764 and it was burned in Geneva and in Paris. A note on the edition: the catalogue holds TWO editions of the Philosophical Dictionary — this one in ten volumes and a single-volume Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary. They are not a duplicate: they are different selections and translations, and the articles do not correspond one to one. The original is French.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
It is very likely (I do not say it is certain--God forbid!) that neither Tyre nor Egypt, nor any other country situated near the Mediterranean Sea, communicated its alphabet to the nations of Eastern Asia. If, for example, the Tyrians, or the Chaldæans, who dwelt near the Euphrates, had communicated their method to the Chinese, some traces of it would have remained; we should have had the signs of the twenty-two, twenty-three, or twenty-four letters, whereas they have a sign for each word in their language; and the number of their words, we are told, is eighty thousand. This method has nothing in common with that of Tyre; it is seventy-nine thousand nine hundred and seventy-six times more learned and more embarrassing than our own. Besides this prodigious difference, they write from the top to the bottom of the page; while the Tyrians and the Chaldæans wrote from right to left, and the Greeks, like ourselves, wrote from left to right. Examine the Tartar, the Hindoo, the Siamese, the Japanese characters; you will not find the least resemblance to the Greek or the Phœnician alphabet. Yet all these nations, and not these alone, but even the Hottentots and Kaffirs, pronounce the vowels and consonants as we do, because the larynx in them is essentially the same as in us--just as the throat of the rudest boor is made like that of the finest opera-singer, the difference, which makes of one a rough, discordant, insupportable bass, and of the other a voice sweeter than the nightingale's, being imperceptible to the most acute anatomist; or, as the brain of a fool is for all the world like the brain of a great genius.