Geneza encyklopedii a walka sztuk
The Origin of Encyclopedias and the Battle of the Arts

Summary/Abstract: The Author concentrates on an analysis of the origin of encyclopaedias and their status within quarrels between seven classical liberal arts, such as grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, astronomy, geometry and music. Justifying the importance of undertaken problems, he turns attention onto a fact, that the greatest researchers of the antiquity show, that the very beginning of a notion of the encyclopaedic knowledge, which appeared among the ancient Greeks, was connected with the liberal arts. The Author tries to prove, that an interest in the encyclopaedic knowledge was in some measure a result of the mutual competition between those arts. He introduces an ante-philosophical ancient Greek conception of knowledge and its popularizers - ancient poets, sophists, and at last philosophers. He underlines, that being influenced by neosophists philosophy came to be identified with rhetoric and poetry, then St. Augustine recognized philosophy as a union of the liberal arts and the esoteric doctrine revealed in the Bible. Consistendy, the encyclopaedic knowledge as a management of all liberal arts came to be an ideal of the science. Although the Enlightenment identified a higher education with empirical sciences, the present day preserved that encyclopaedic notion of the educated persons, delivered by Latin encyclopaedists, in what inhabitants of the West call „the man of Renaissance".

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