Structure
The Philosophical Dictionary is structured in the tradition of Bayle, Diderot and D'Alembert - that is to say, alphabetically ordered. Although this order helps readers more easily find articles, this was not meant to be a dictionary or encyclopaedia in the same totalizing way of D'Alembert's project. Voltaire's writing is neither objective nor varied in opinion; the same arguments are made throughout the Philosophical Dictionary emphasizing the point of his discontent.
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Famous quotes containing the word structure:
“Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“For the structure that we raise,
Time is with materials filled;
Our to-days and yesterdays
Are the blocks with which we build.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1809–1882)
“With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)