 As we saw in  section 2  above, the Aufbau project began as a continuation of the encyclopedic ambitions of the Enlightenment, in response to the catastrophe of the war and the hopes inspired by the German revolution—only that in contrast to the eighteenth-century Encyclopédistes, and to similar projects since then, Carnap conceived the idea of a system of knowledge as a deductive system, under the influence of his teacher Frege.