The term Encyclopedist is usually used for a group of French philosophers who collaborated in the 18th century in the production of the Encyclopédie, under the direction of Denis Diderot. It can also be used as a general term for a person helping to write an encyclopedia.
The Encyclopédie has been considered a repository of information and polemical arsenal.
It was an idea of the editors and people that were working on its production that if civilization should be entirely destroyed, mankind might turn to their volumes to learn to reconstruct it.
