Roman, Hanna. The Logic of the Invisible: Perceiving the Submarine World in French Enlightenment Geography. In The Aesthetics of the Undersea, edited by Margaret Cohen and Killian Quigley, 42-53. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2019.

In the Preliminary Discourse (1751) of the French Enlightenment Encyclopedia, or Reasoned Dictionary of Sciences, Arts and Crafts, the mathematician Jean DAlembert described the organization of disciplines asa kind of map of the world.Each article was like a single country, presumed to be linked geographically and culturally to others, but these links could be difficult to perceive. What obscured them was likened to the ocean:The Universe is nothing but a vast Ocean, upon the surface of which we perceive ... islands, some bigger, some smaller, whose link to the continent is hidden from us." To create the map of disciplines, seemingly arbitrary islands of knowledge had to be placed within a larger network, but the ocean blurred the pathways that connected them.

For more information on the published version, visit Routledge's Website.

Citation