Propaedia
From Freepedia
The Propaedia (properly spelled as "Propædia," with the ligature) is the introductory volume of the Encyclopædia Britannica, intended to give a topical view of the encyclopaedia's contents in addition to the alphabetical view, providing an "outline of knowledge." It first appeared with the 15th edition of the Britannica published in 1974.
It was a 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 Britannica.) The Propaedia breaks knowledge into ten categories and goes down seven levels. Adler stresses in his book, A Guidebook to Knowledge, that the ten categories should not be taken as hierarchical but as circular. It took eight years of work. "The whole of the Propaedia’s synoptic outline of knowledge deserves to be read carefully,” Adler wrote in A Guidebook (pp. 91-2). “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.”
The corresponding Wikipedia topics are:
