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The one-volume Propædia is the first of three parts of the 15th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, the other two being the 12-volume Micropædia and the 17-volume Macropædia. The Propædia is intended as a topical organization of the Britannica's contents, complementary to the alphabetical organization of the other two parts. 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.
Contents
In March 2012, Britannica's president, Jorge Cauz, announced that it would not produce any new print editions of the encyclopaedia, with the 2010 15th edition being the last. This was announced as a move by the company to adapt to the times and focus on its future using digital distribution.
Outline of Knowledge
Analogous to the Britannica itself, the Outline has three types of goals: epistemological, educational, and organizational. In the epistemological arena, it seeks to provide a systematic, strictly hierarchical categorization of all possible human knowledge, a 20th-century analog of the Great Chain of Being and Francis Bacon's outline in Instauratio magna. In the educational arena, the Propædia lays out a course of study for each major discipline, a "roadmap" for a student who wishes to learn a field in its entirety. Finally, the Propædia serves as an expanded Table of Contents for the Micropædia and Macropædia; according to its designer, Mortimer J. Adler, all the articles of the Britannica were commissioned based on the Outline of Knowledge.
The Outline has ten Parts, each with an introductory essay. The authors of these essays are listed below in the final column of Table 1. The same ten men were responsible for developing the outline for their Part, 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).
Each of the ten Parts contains from 2 to 7 Divisions, which in turn contain from 2 to 11 Sections. These Sections form the basic categories of knowledge in the schema, and each one is given a special three-part numerical code to encode its place in the Outline's hierarchy. For example, the section "Military Technology" has the code "736" indicating that it is the 6th Section of the 3rd Division ("Major Fields of Technology") of the 7th Part ("Technology"). Forward slashes are used when a Part, Division or Section has more than one digit; for example, the Section "History and Philosophy of Logic" has the code "10/11" indicating that it is the 1st section of the 1st Division ("Logic") of the 10th Part ("The Branches of Knowledge").
The Outline was an eight-year project of Mortimer J. Adler, published 32 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 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.
The whole of the Propædia's synoptic outline of knowledge deserves to be read carefully. It represents a twentieth-century scheme for the organization of knowledge that is more comprehensive than any other and that also accommodates the intellectual heterodoxy of our time.
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.