[KALKI]

Jean Sylvain Bailly (1736 – 1793) was a French astronomer, mathematician, freemason, and political leader of the early part of the French Revolution
. |
Jean-Sylvain Bailly was born in the Louvre and died less than a mile away, under the guillotine. In the space and time in between, he managed to embody both the Enlightenment scientific establishment and the French revolutionary process: along with Condorcet, his arch-rival at the Academy of Sciences, he was one of the few revolutionaries to have first gained notoriety as a philosophe. But Bailly's intellectual career, from astronomy to history to politics, also illustrates the strangely seamless connections that could exist in the eighteenth century between empirical inquiry and mythological speculation. Though Condorcet would dismissively refer to his colleague as a "frère illuminé," alluding to Bailly's supposed Masonic and metaphysical sympathies, the astronomer was equally at home at the Academy as among the mythical peoples he discovered in the past. He was neither an illuminist nor a materialist, but inhabited the grey zone that we have chosen to term "the Super-Enlightenment." http://collections.stanford.edu/supe...ection=authors by Dan Edelstein
Assistant professor of French
Stanford University |

Source: Histoire de l'astronomie moderne, depuis la fondation de l'école d'Alexandrie jusqu'à l'époque de MDCCLXXXII Publisher:
A Paris : Chez les frères de Bure, 1782. Author:
Jean Sylvain Bailly, Bürgermeister Parlamentarier Naturwissenschafter Frankreich | www.SherawaliMaa.com