The Poets and the Philosophers: Genius and Analogy in Descartes and the Encyclopédie (Following Aristotle)

The article tackles the relationship between genius and analogy in Descartes’s early writings and the programmatic writings of the Encyclopédie. For Descartes, ingenious analogies between phenomena that are not obviously related belong to the discourse of poetic truth, whereas philosophy must be content with more easily observable and methodical comparisons. In the encyclopedic ordering of Diderot and d’Alembert, by contrast, ingenious analogies are not specific to any particular field of knowledge, since genius consists in connecting even the most remote branches of the tree of knowledge. I argue that the theoretical core of both approaches can be traced back to Aristotle’s theory of metaphor, which relies on the analogy of genera rather than species.