There is a hint of paradox in opening this collection of texts on the procedures for totalizing knowledge in Antiquity by calling to witness the Platonic dialogues. What might they contribute, besides a critique of Sophistic polymathy, Socrates’ nescience, his way of jumping in and interrupting long discourses, the disconcerting interlude of preliminary questions, and the aporetic collapses? A host of questions does not make a book, much less a library - unless the Socratic stratagem defines some entirely new conditions, or unless Plato's argument authorizes, beyond a program of study, a way of constituting knowledge with its hierarchized elements and the articulations called for by this program. A few remarks are in order here.

Aristotle's endeavor, at least insofar as we can judge from the way it has been transmitted to us and from the titles of the lost works, is often presented as the first work of an encyclopedic nature, as it seems to embrace and order all of the elements of knowledge. Does Aristotle not advance a classification of sciences, in Metaphysics, E, 1, as well as a systematic outline of the “sciences of nature” in his Meteorologica, I, 1? And again, although logic is often presented as not belonging to the system of sciences since it is not counted as a science in Metaphysics, E, 1, is Aristotle not generally considered the inventor of this discipline? The impression is all the stronger in that Andronicus of Rhodes, in the first century b.c., edited Aristotle's works by roughly adopting the threefold division of philosophy into Logic-Physics-Ethics, a division that had become common during the Hellenistic period though more particularly proper to the Stoic system. Since then, all the editions of Aristotle, in every language, have been made to serve the order in which Aristotle's treatises were thus edited.

What does “encyclopedic knowledge” mean to us today? I believe that, as in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, what we mean by this term is a knowledge that strives to embrace in detail the greatest possible number of sciences and bodies of knowledge. As Sainte-Beuve said in 1850 regarding Madame de Genlis:

The Letter of Aristeas, a text written in Greek by a Jewish author of the Alexandrian diaspora, probably in the second century b.c., traces the circumstances under which a Greek translation of the sacred book of the Jews, the Pentateuch, was commissioned by King Ptolemy II Philadelphus. The letter situates this undertaking in the broader context of the foundation of the Library of Alexandria on the advice of Demetrius of Phalerum, who instigated the plan to gather together all the world's books, both those in the possession of the Greeks and those “of other peoples.”

The history of encyclopedism seeks to trace the metamorphoses and various cultural adaptations of three essential components. The first of these is an intellectual endeavor, reflecting the conception, hierarchy, and articulation of knowledge in a given society: How is the map of knowledge organized and defined? How do human thought and memory gather together and master all accessible knowledge? The second component can take the form of a material object, the encyclopedia - whether conceived as a book that unites the knowledge found in all other books, or again as the body of texts that, though not titled as such, belong nevertheless to an encyclopedic genre. The last constituent of the trilogy consists of the group of practices that fan out between these two poles, between the intellectual endeavor and the material object, and contribute to collecting, shaping, and transmitting the knowledge in a given society and time.

The New Alexandrian Library is to be inaugurated at the end of 1998 on the royal site of the great ancient metropolis, that is, on the site of the Museum founded by Ptolemy I to enclose his mythical collection of books. This ambitious project of a “public research library “ was undertaken on the initiative of the Egyptian government and has, since 1986, received the support of UNESCO.

To be able to make “change” happen in the lives of patients entrusted to his care, Watzlawick says he tried to produce a theory about it. He was forced to acknowledge that the mechanisms of change resist systematization and, therefore, all wishes to elicit them as well.

Well-being is to therapy what discovery is to thought and the event is to History: the position – unforeseen, unforeseeable – in reality of what did not hitherto exist. And heuristics would be, if not a science, since there could be no science of change, then at least the name given to reflection on its mystery.

Informing the Superior General of the Society of Jesus that the cornerstone of the Jesuit mission in China – that is, Father Matteo Ricci – had passed away on 3 May 1610, Father Pasio wrote:

Approximately three centuries later, a man whom Father Delattre unhesitatingly called “our indefatigable Sinologist” – Father Léon Wieger – also died on Chinese soil.