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Who should be bounced from The Great Books series?
Before leaving for Japan, I'd been pawing through these volumes lately -- you know, the U. Chicago fat tomes with two columns on each page? The obvious question is which books belong and which do not; overall I'm surprised at how well the 1952 picks have held up and yes that is tribute to the University of Chicago or at least its influence.
I'm sad that Hume doesn't get his own volume, including many of his shorter essays. Plus I'd like to add Dickens's Bleak House and at least the first two books of Proust. And who to bounce? I nominate Plotinus as the obvious choice, noting that he has only about 24,000 cites on scholar.google.com, not even as many as Joseph Stiglitz.
In 1990 they dropped four books: Apollonius' On Conic Sections, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, and Joseph Fourier's Analytical Theory of Heat. The loss of Sterne is regretted but the others we can do without. You'll find a list of the added books in 1990 at the first link, about halfway down and yes they did include Swann's Way. Little Dorrit is not the best or even the second best Dickens selection. Most are good picks though I would have left the Bergson, the Dewey (unreadable), and tossed out some of the shorter works in favor of Ulysses. More William James is never a bad idea; how about The Varieties of Religious Experience? None of the science books will age well. And how about a wee bit of Mises and Hayek to reflect the failures of socialism? Absalom, Absalom would help cover race and maybe Mill on The Subjection of Women should be there too.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on May 30, 2008 at 09:35 AM in Books, History | Permalink
Comments
bleak house: by far my favorite 'non standard' dickens...maybe even beats out some of the more well known volumes. fun to see that you liked it as well.
Posted by: shawn at May 30, 2008 9:53:17 AM
Well, there's still clearly too darn much Freud, but he can't be dropped completely, so there's no help there. Balzac? Surely they could squeeze "The Road To Serfdom" into Volume 57?
Posted by: Dave at May 30, 2008 10:03:51 AM
I guess modern mathematics is not part of western culture then. Newton's Principia is still there, but much of that is pretty antiquated; whereas the enormous advance in mathematical analysis is now completely unrepresented, not even Gauss, who shd be ancient enough to be respectable, one would think.
Posted by: corporate serf at May 30, 2008 10:05:08 AM
Tyler, I respect and admire your learning and your judgement a lot, but you're wrong on Plotinus. I don't even need to go into how preposterous it is to use scholar.google.com as a benchmark for a Great Books series. The fact is that neoplatonism - best represented by Plotinus - is one of the most important schools of thought in the history of Western civilization. It's runs through all late classical Roman times, the Middle Ages and it is just impossible to begin to understand the Renaissance without a firm grasp of its main tenets. Millenialism, Kabbalah, Sufism, Christian Theology, William Blake and, for that matter, Jorge Luis Borges would be incomprehensible without The Enneads, the book you would like to see dropped.
Bottom line: Plotinus must stay!
Posted by: Diogo at May 30, 2008 10:07:09 AM
Diogo, I was joking with the scholar.google.com bit...I still think all of the developments you mention could have occurred without Plotinus...
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at May 30, 2008 10:09:30 AM
The dropping of Apollonius is dearly a deep loss. i'm glad I own a version of the set with it. You can't understand *anything* in Newton's Principia without it. Even more, that work makes it clear just how enormous the Greeks' knowledge of mathematics was--they knew nearly everything in algebra, and had discovered it all with geometry. Modern math is predicated on these things, and these are truly great works.
I found that the literature is what holds up poorly over time. Perhaps it's just our modern sensibility, but Flaubert's A Simple Heart and even Goethe's Faust do rather poorly. Perhaps their translations are the problem?
Posted by: mouse at May 30, 2008 10:13:56 AM
I get that Freud doesn't hold up as science but I think that the idea that human behavior is governed by the interaction of competing mental systems is an important take away. Though maybe he could share a volume with Jung's Man and his Symbols. I would probably try to cut Aquinas down to one volume though.
I would remove animal farm because it is a stupid awful book and not stupid and awful in any interesting way. I would think brave new world would have to have a place. Six characters in search of an author can go. Being and Nothingness and No Exit would be good inclusions. Maybe The Stranger, Maybe the Sound and the Fury.
Posted by: Michael Foody at May 30, 2008 10:30:07 AM
As a graduate of St. John's College in Annapolis, Chicago's Great Books series has a special place in my heart. Two points.
First, Apollonius is very important for understanding the development of astronomy and the rise of modern physics -- I'd keep him.
Second, I agree with Tyler about Plotinus. Not only is he critical to understanding Augustine and the development of Christian theology (e.g., the trinity), but Leszek Kolakowski rightly, in my opinion, asserts in his "Main Currents of Marxism" that Plotinus is the philosophical godfather of "dialectics", or the urge to overcome differences like the object-subject dichotomy. We need Plotinus to understand Hegel and Marx and their offspring who for good and ill are still with us today in various guises.
Posted by: Massachusetts Johnnie at May 30, 2008 10:55:23 AM
I personally think the literature is the most dispensable part of the series.
If you view the 'great books' as a means to understanding our own intellectual and spiritual horizon, then Euclid and Marx are givens, while Dickens, for example, isn't. Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky would be necessary, however.
Posted by: massachusetts Johnnie at May 30, 2008 11:05:42 AM
Massachusetts Johnnie, if you think all that about Plotinus, then you agree with me, not with Tyler (to whom I apologize for missing the joke).
Posted by: Diogo at May 30, 2008 11:21:47 AM
Drop Plotinus because his writings were sufficient, but not necessary, for what follows? That seems an odd standard. That is certainly not the standard you have used for suggesting that old fashioned thinking on science be dropped.
So, is this library to be based upon principle or whim? Are these books presented together to remind us of how we got where we are, intellectually, or to tickle us by confirming our own views of the world? Dewey is unreadable, but changed thinking about formal education. Is changing thinking about formal education for a few generations a great enough accomplishment to earn inclusion? At the cost of shedding a representative of the origins of modern scientific thinking?
The big library available to us now is larger than ever. We can have any book we want, so "books we want" seems a poor argument for changing the Great Books library. This particular small library should perform some function that our own prefered reading list does not. Both Mises and Hayek? That is the Tyler library, not a small library of representative great books. Is this a library of social problems or, as the editors suggest, of Great Ideas? Which of the Great Ideas does Faulkner treat so well that he cannot be left out?
Posted by: kharris at May 30, 2008 11:33:21 AM
Drop all the science texts. Reading them as if they're literature or philosophy or history is a mistake.
Each of the scientists and mathematicians made important contributions that are worth knowing and understanding. But there's no reason to consult the original text to learn, about, say Euclid or Newton.
Unless you're teaching history of science. But the world is full of first-rate mathematicians and physicists and engineers who learned from (and built on) Euclid and Newton without ever bothering with the orginal works.
That's how science and math work. Ideas matter, not texts.
Posted by: Auto at May 30, 2008 12:03:46 PM
people steal read marx lol
Posted by: anon at May 30, 2008 12:08:38 PM
Oh look, Tyler found another instance of it being thought reasonable to rank works of art. Big surprise, Tyler chimes in, casually dismissing Tom Jones as an obviously ungreat book. (How could any smart person think otherwise?) The shtick is tired.
Posted by: l at May 30, 2008 12:08:48 PM
Scandalously, weirdly missing are Horace's poetry (not to mention Sappho and Catullus); Castiglione's The Courtier; Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent; and Bayle's Dictionary -- to name a few.
I won't mention Mme de Lafayette, Mme de Sevigne, and Mme de Stael, Benjamin Constant, and Turgenev -- all of whom are certainly of much more historical, political, and literary importance than Fielding. And Thomas Hardy -- poems and novels. Missing? For shame. Turgenev belongs there more than Dostoyevsky, I would say.
Emma is an eccentric choice of the Austen novels.
Posted by: harold at May 30, 2008 12:29:57 PM
None of the science books will age well as science books. If you're trying to understand Special Relativity, Einstein's original papers are a terrible place to start, and plenty of physics textbooks do a better job of explanation. In fact, many modern (but still non-great-books-quality) works can be said to have a deeper understanding of the issues. Ditto for early quantum mechanics literature---it's much better explained, and in many cases with more thorough understanding, in more recent work.
But the same is true of all of the Great Books. The point of this list is not to find things that "age well", the point is to find things which are important foundations of "civilization". Modern civilization, broadly thought of, owes much to the early impact of Special Relativity, in its atom-bomb incarnation as well as its popular everything-is-relative misperceptions. Modern civilization owes fairly little to, e.g., Bell's Inequality and Quantum Electrodynamics and the deep and lasting (but mostly accessible-only-to-experts) insights therein. Planck's "Selected Papers" give you these writings in (more or less) the same form in which they impacted civilization, not in the form in which post-Planck works have redistilled them. That seems to match the goal of the Great Books approach.
Anyway, there's no point worrying about what works will age well. You have to pick some sort of reference point for the "civilization" you're talking about. Remember that the idea that the Greeks and Romans are important is not itself an immutable constant, but one which has had ups and downs. A Great Books list written in the mid-to-late 20th century will reflect a mid-to-late 20th century notion of how important they were, and right now it looks for all the world like early-20th-century thoughts about space, time, and matter were the revolutionary ones. If it turns out that Planck's and Schrodinger's quantum mechanics was a negligible 100-year-long blip in the overall sweep of science history---if they're superseded by something even more sweeping that lasts for the next 1000 years---well, that's for future editors to emend.
Imagine a Great Books list compiled in 1890---how much Egyptology would it have contained? How much Ruskinian aesthetics? How about the Rubaiyat? Would they have been "wrong" to include these things, which would later be seen as fairly-short-lived fads?
(I don't particularly hold with the Great Books approach generally, I must say ...)
Posted by: Ben M at May 30, 2008 12:38:07 PM
Looking over the lists, I'm surprised at the dearth of reformation literature. Calvin's Institutes was a 1990 addition, good, but where's Luther's The Bondage of the Will? Or a selection of the (mostly pretty short) reformation creeds: The Heidelberg Catechism, The Westminster Confession of Faith, The Canons of Dort, The Belgic Confession? Or Luther's 99 theses?
Posted by: Bob Montgomery at May 30, 2008 12:43:20 PM
Dropping anyone shows how true understanding of that person hasn't set in and how the forces of nepotism bias self serving intellectuals.
Posted by: Ron C. de Weijze at May 30, 2008 1:15:20 PM
Forcing anyone to read Ulysses should probably be illegal.
Posted by: Andy at May 30, 2008 2:00:09 PM
I agree the loss of Tristram shandy is a shame, though it is a fairly bizarre outlier in so many ways, that it is almost anti-canonical. Also, it is subversive and just plain funny, which maybe boots it off the list.
More surreal than Brautigan (and a better read), predates Proust by 200 years and plays with the futility of writing reconstructing the past with far more wit and imagination, it's a work of truly odd and remarkable genius, given the period in which it was written.
And Tom Jones was OK, but Moll Flanders was better.
Posted by: benny lava at May 30, 2008 3:14:12 PM
I too attended St. John's College in Annapolis (like the poster @ May 30, 2008 10:55:23 AM) and as a life-long student of this curriculum, thus feel compelled to chime in.
Regarding the question of Apollonius, his place in this canon is buttressed, and rightly so, by its explicit influence on several other texts that appear here—notably those works of astronomy and physics appearing in Volume 16 and Volume 34. Remove it and you remove the foundational innards of these later works. It is often asked, why we should include any of these later works of science or math at all (much less earlier ones such as those by Archimedes or Euclid), dated as they are? But if this series is meant to chart in some way the broader evolution of ideas, it would be a mistake to exclude such essential steps. A familiarity with Euclid via Euclid, or Apollonius via Apollonius, will place you that much closer to those who wrote with a direct familiarity with Euclid or Apollonius: I am thinking here in particular of at least a couple of authors that appear on the list, the explicit Euclidean influence in Hobbes’s thinking and methodology, and likewise in Spinoza’s thought and writing too—or, Wittgenstein and the whole rise of analytic philosophy, which owes much to Spinoza and the Greek geometrical tradition.
The Wiki article notes that “The second edition did drop two scientific works, by Apollonius and Fourier, at least in part because of their perceived difficulty for the average reader.” By that reasoning, Ptolemy’s Almagest or Newton’s Principia could just as well be dropped. If anything, I think the series could use a little more math and science—if not with the return of Apollonius, then with the addition of other overlooked
volumes of such thought.
Posted by: Dedalus at May 30, 2008 3:19:05 PM
Though I was fortunate enough as a freshman and sophomore at a distinguished university to take a year-long and demanding course in the history of Western Civilization and then an equal-length and demanding course in a survey of Western literature, I have always thought that the The Great Books education concocted by Hutchins and Adler at the University of Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s was something of a disaster . . . so much so that most departments at Chicago refused to recognize the undergrad degree for admittance to their Ph.D. programs. As for Adler's and Van Doren's book, How to Read a Book, it has a few intersting things to say about reading, but it says nothing in 300 or more pages than what Francis Bacon summarized in a couple.
.......
One problem: Adler hated almost all modern philosophy, and it was only in the later 1990 volume --- when he had no control over it --- that some 19th century philosophers were added, and not necessarily the most important. Then, too, he also had very little understanding of science and thought that science courses for undergrads should focus on the original texts . . . an approach that would have, say, chemists study the texts of alchemists in the middle ages.
He was also ignorant of the social sciences, as was Hutchins (whom I came to know when, as a new member of the faculty at UC Santa Barbara, I joined the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions --- which he headed at the time, living the good life at a huge estate in Montecito a tad east of Santa Barbara on the coast.
............
Nor is that all. Anyone whose education was limited to the Great Books project would come away knowing nothing important about non-Western civilizations --- Arab, Chinese, Persian, Japanese, Aztec-Inca, and so on, including their religious traditions.
What the Great Books education did foster was a kind of insular outlook good for scoring points at cocktail parties, with limited knowledge of any subject in depth. Looking over the extended list of the 2nd edition (1990), I find that anyone whose knowledge is confined to those books would know nothing about modern philosophy, the scientific method and modern science, the modern social sciences, almost all important novels, poetry, and drama of the last 150 years, modern empire-building, the emergence of nation-states, the rise and fall of European power globally speaking, military history in the modern world, and anything in modern art and music and theater and movies beyond what philistines themselves are repelled by.
............
Michael Gordon, aka the buggy professor: http://www.thebuggyprofessor.org
Posted by: michael gordon at May 30, 2008 3:24:47 PM
"But there's no reason to consult the original text to learn, about, say Euclid or Newton."
That strikes me as pretty wrongheaded. Without knowing Euclid in the original, for example, you would have no idea what leaps and bounds were taken to get from Euclid's geometry to the infinitely more abstract and symbolic -- and unreal -- forms of algebra, calculus, and the stuff that passes for "Euclidean" geometry in the average high school.
To do without original texts implies an enormous amount of faith on your part in whomever you're getting your "facts" from.
Posted by: massachusetts Johnnie at May 30, 2008 3:29:35 PM
This reminds me of a story I heard about a class at Boston College in which the students were very dismissive of "ancient" ways of thinking.
The professor interrupted the conversation, and offered any student an "A" for the semester if she could go to the chalkboard and successfully demonstrate to the professor's liking that the earth moves around the sun, and not vice versa.
Nobody accepted the challenge.
Posted by: massachusetts Johnnie at May 30, 2008 3:35:27 PM
Sorry, but the suggestion that Plotinus be removed is dotty. Everyone knows Whitehead's line about western philosophy being a series of footnotes to Plato. What many people don't realize is that throughout most of the history of western civilization, scholars didn't actually have access to Plato -- what they had, first and foremost, was Plotinus, which for the most part they took to be Plato.
Allow me to quote my colleague's SEP article on the subject: "Until well into the 19th century, Platonism was in large part understood, appropriated or rejected based on its Plotinian expression and in adumbrations of this. The theological traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all, in their formative periods, looked to ancient Greek philosophy for the language and arguments with which to articulate their religious visions. For all of these, Platonism expressed the philosophy that seemed closest to their own theologies. Plotinus was the principal source for their understanding of Platonism."
To a quick introduction to the massive importance of Plotinus, I would start with Al-Farabi's "The opinions of the citizens of the virtuous city."
Posted by: Joseph Heath at May 30, 2008 3:44:43 PM
"To do without original texts implies an enormous amount of faith on your part in whomever you're getting your 'facts' from."
As sympathetic to the Great Books concept as I am, I would suggest that this is a true but unworkably impractical quibble. I would agree wholeheartedly that some degree of faith is required to accept certain sources. But consider the alternative: if individuals were required to understand and submit full proofs of every underlying fact before making an argument, we would be in our graves well before accomplishing anything of significance.
Obviously, I'm taking this to an extreme. But consider the example of a neurosurgeon friend of mine: he doesn't need to read original medical texts nor to serve as an effective medical school department chair and research lead. Would he be a better physician or academic if he had read and understood those things? I'd say no - not in the slightest. Part of being able to advance is understanding what is trustworthy and what is not... the sum of human knowledge is simply too vast for any individual to fully grasp all of it. That's why specialization is so common now.
In short, I think there's intellectual value to a liberal arts or Great Books approach to learning - but it's neither required nor even, in many cases, appropriate. That's why in many cases I think the literature component of the Great Books list is actually the most worthwhile. Aesthetic projects have far more staying power and can't be transmitted as effectively through Cliff's Notes.
Posted by: Geoff Bro at May 30, 2008 5:06:24 PM
@Auto:
"Drop all the science texts. Reading them as if they're literature or philosophy or history is a mistake."
But they are literature and philosophy. Euclid's Elements is a masterpiece of synthetic, contemplation-oriented pure mathematics. His thoughts on number are not attempts to get to a modern notion of number -- they're their own thing. The book has a narrative structure.
Posted by: at May 30, 2008 6:15:45 PM
Oops, forgot to sign that.
PS: Gosh, a lot of Johnnies on this board -- including me.
Posted by: Benquo at May 30, 2008 6:16:58 PM
Bovuard and Pequtet by Flaubert deserve to be there.Is the basis for Ulyses.My favorite Flauberts is Saint Anthony ´s temptation but is only a matter of taste.Faust get old bad?Goethe deserve more than one place there. Tristam was the result of plagiarism so its dont belong there.Dostoiesvsky is far more important the Turguenev, but for sure Father and sons belongs there, And Balzac is one of the best 10 authors ever lived .
Posted by: karl at May 30, 2008 6:17:43 PM
@ michael gordon at May 30, 2008 3:24:47 PM
A part of me partly agrees with the gist of what you say, in particular your criticism of Adler. But I think it rests on some faulty assumptions. You write:
“Nor is that all. Anyone whose education was limited to the Great Books project would come away knowing nothing important about non-Western civilizations --- Arab, Chinese, Persian, Japanese, Aztec-Inca, and so on, including their religious traditions.”
A core-curriculum of the Great Books does not indeed teach such subjects. But in so much as all civilizations are rooted in certain universal laws of human nature, it seems to me a gross simplification to say that a student of the Great Books comes “away knowing nothing important about non-Western civilizations.” The value of such an education—or of any young person’s education, I’d argue—is not comprised of some sort of cumulative acquisition; it is not to become an encyclopedia by imbibing an encyclopedic list. I do not think we have time to discuss reading methodologies, but one of the principle values of such an education, of reading the Great Books, rests therein: It is meant to endow its readers with a critical mind, and prolonged exposure to the foremost critical (Western) minds of the last 2,000 years does facilitate that end. It also should—and in my experience, generally does—foster a deep love and appreciation for all critical and deep thought, Western or not.
But let’s pretend for a moment that the Great Book student might suffer from insularity, as you suggest, and that this approach is inferior to an alternative course of study: Who is this student of Arab, Chinese, Persian, Japanese, Aztec-Inca, (and so on) civilizations? What does he major in and how deep and broad is his knowledge, assuming it is not just to score points at cocktail parties? Does this student also study the Western canon? Does he study math, science, and so forth? Presumably he is broad-minded enough to also take on “modern philosophy, the scientific method and modern science, the modern social sciences, almost all important novels, poetry, and drama of the last 150 years, modern empire-building, the emergence of nation-states, the rise and fall of European power globally speaking, military history in the modern world, and anything in modern art and music and theater and movies”? It seems you are implicitly arguing for the generalist’s case ("with limited knowledge of any subject in depth.") in one place and yet explicitly speaking out against him in others.
Modern civilization obviously needs students with a deeper and more specialized knowledge than the Great Books can offer. But I also believe the GBs are a solid foundation and can serve as a buoyant springboard for more specialized training. I don’t think the GBs foster insularity, at all, but rather just the opposite. Something like a core-curriculum for two years or so followed by specialized study may be the best course of undergraduate study. It’s not the only way, however. Read the following link which shows the top 10 institutions in the nation ranked by percentage of graduates who go on to earn a Ph.D. in selected disciplines: http://www.reed.edu/ir/phd.html
The Great Books college St. John’s College (in Annapolis and Santa Fe) scores as follows:
1st in English Literature
1st in the Humanities
3rd in Linguistics
4th in Area and Ethnic Studies
6th in Political Science
6th in Foreign Languages
9th in Math and Computer Sciences
They may not be for everybody, so to speak, but it seems the Great Books remain capable of preparing healthy young minds for study beyond the confines of Western or pre-modern thought contained in their pages.
Posted by: Dedalus at May 30, 2008 6:24:16 PM
Linking to this discussion, a very wise friend of mine comments, "I wish I had read more Plotinus instead of reading that post."
Posted by: matthew at May 30, 2008 7:24:40 PM
I do think there is a sort of de-facto canon, but it varies with criteria for chosing it. The criteria for choosing Hutchins and Adler's great books were sort of bogus, in my view, and had to do with propping up religion and the status quo, with its "absolute, unchanging, and eternal values", supposedly under assault by communism and the so-called "relativist" enlilghtenment. The status quo at the time the list was drawn up included the subjection of women and the hierarchical organization of society.
But since social stratification and the inequality of women are now longer so fashionable (thank heavens), the idea that it might be valuable to know some basic information about our cultural past has fallen into disrepute as "too controversial" or "elitist", which is too bad. We seem doomed to live in an eternal cultural present.
It is unfortunate because I think the exercise of drawing up "the ideal curriculum" is a worthwhile one for what it tells about ourselves, if nothing else.
Reading books, however, even so-called "Western books," in translation is a dubious proposition. Why shouldn't an educated person aspire to know at least enough of one ancient and one other modern language to read great literature in that language? -- it needn't be Latin or Greek, it could be Chinese or Hebrew or Sanskrit. The original Oxford "greats" program aspired to this ideal. The professors there at least were expected to know the literature in its original language.
Posted by: harold at May 30, 2008 7:44:26 PM
I'm still not clear why folks here consider Euclid's Elements to be so important (as opposed to the mathematics it contains) that it needs to be part of a Great Books or similar such curriculum.
That the text merits study is not in dispute. But in a history of mathematics seminar.
Posted by: Auto at May 30, 2008 9:55:13 PM
"Reading books, however, even so-called "Western books," in translation is a dubious proposition."
No, it isn't. Poetry in translation may sometimes be dubious, but the prose writings of Montaigne, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Proust, Flaubert, etc. are magnificent even in translation.
"Why shouldn't an educated person aspire to know at least enough of one ancient and one other modern language to read great literature in that language?"
That's exactly what the Great Books program at St. Johns College requires.
Posted by: boo at May 30, 2008 10:26:35 PM
Hooke's Micrographia ages well, but requires production standards rather beyond what went into the Great Books volumes.
Posted by: Cyrus at May 30, 2008 10:43:26 PM
"I'm still not clear why folks here consider Euclid's Elements to be so important (as opposed to the mathematics it contains) that it needs to be part of a Great Books or similar such curriculum."
Here's my personal experience with Euclid, speaking as someone with a degree in mathematics: I studied geometry for a year as a sophomore, using a typical textbook in a typical American high school. The year after I discovered a copy of Euclid's Elements in my local library, and by studying the first two books over the weekend I learned more about geometry than I had during my entire yearlong high school geometry class.
Modern elementary geometry textbooks are dumbed down. Euclid isn't. Outside of advanced higher level mathematics textbooks (like Rudin's text on analysis), you won't find any equal to Euclid in elegance or concision.
Posted by: boo at May 30, 2008 10:44:15 PM
Drop Dante. A silly book, IMO. If the intention is to present some western fundamentalist version of Hades, surely something else can be found. If it is the poetic quality, well then, drop the translation, lol.
Add selections from the Old and New Testament. How one can ignore early christian utilitarianism, not to mention the older base judicial utilities of the Old, as a foundation for western philosophy, I don't know. Though I do see a comment above regarding Plotinus that alludes it may be unecessary. More along the lines of judicial philosophy, how is this represented in this series, if at all? Also, why is Toqueville included?
Drop War and Peace in favor of Anna Karenina. You may, if you feel it necessary, include the passages of the peasants' capture by Napoleon.
I would drop Nietsche.
I would add Red and the Black by Stendhal, but only because I really like it :)
Posted by: DPirate at May 30, 2008 11:03:29 PM
Euclid’s Elements is one of those broadly scientific works that have become one of the building blocks from which important modes of thought in the wider culture have been constructed. The Origin of Species might be another. So, for example, if you’ve encountered geometry in its Euclidean formulation it is easier to appreciate one of the motivations behind the Greek predeliction for the idea that true knowledge must deal with the eternal and immutable. It’s important if you want to understand the cast of Spinoza’s mind, or that of Hobbes. It’s important if you want to understand Kant’s view of mathematics. It’s a common reference point in the wider culture because for a long time many educated people knew the book itself.
Posted by: Amit at May 30, 2008 11:11:39 PM
There's a major failing in omitting most of the significant works of Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror, there also seems to be a major lack in the area of feminism.
In non-fiction:
I would add A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft which is a pretty short and rather important early feminist work.
In fiction:
Horror:
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Dracula by Bram Stoker, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson to cover a lot of the origins of Horror along with a selection of H P Lovecraft (including The Call of Cthulhu and At the Mountains of Madness).
Science Fiction:
Selected Jules Verne and H G Wells to cover early hard and soft science fiction respectively. There is a problem with Golden Age Science Fiction as most is still in copyright, Sir Arthur Clarke's works will be until 2079.
Fantasy:
For early Fantasy, the same problem applies as with Golden Age Science Fiction, the single most important work in the genre is The Lord of The Rings, which is both very long and copyright until 2044. so cannot be included yet, which effectively leaves out High Fantasy. Some Robert Howard can go in to cover the Sword and Sorcery sub-genre and some Lord Dunsany.
Posted by: Brett Dunbar at May 31, 2008 12:29:11 PM
Besides the fact that Euclid is in many ways the source of most of the mathematics that followed him, and that his work served as a model for knowledge itself (e.g. Plato's Meno) and inspired the mathemtical bent of modern philosophers likes Hobbes and Descartes, there are genuine philosophical questions that his work should raise in contemporary readers' minds.
Euclid's work seems "real" in a way that algebra and calculus (think: infinitesimal) don't. I'm not saying they're not real or representative of reality (they're certainly useful) but it's important, even for contemporary thinkers, to understand where the categories in which they think came from. Some people -- even mathematics PhD's! -- think that there's something self-evident about alegebra and the calculus, when there's actually much more to the story.
That doesn't mean offering "proofs" for everything, but it might mean roughly knowing the story of how we got from "realistic" Euclidean geometry to the heights of abstraction that make up modern mathematics.
Posted by: massachusetts Johnnie at May 31, 2008 2:13:55 PM
I like Tom Jones quite a bit, and would be sad to see it go.
But more importantly -- The Varieties of Religious Experience ISN'T on the list?? Not that I should be the final judge of anything, but it's the best thing I've ever read...
Posted by: JMW at May 31, 2008 5:50:38 PM
1) Absalom, Absalom would 'help cover race'? How about something by a Euro-American whose ancestry wasn't socially constructed as white?
2) Also, while I personally find the Great Books curriculum as held here to be unsatisfying and incomplete, I take the point that it can be very helpful to concentrate fully on one area, in one geographically (and racially and gender-ly and class-ly, apparently) discrete unit, to get to know a culture, perspective, and history deeply. But the culture/history/body of knowledge chronicled here is not 'Western,' it is 'European,' and we need to start using appopriately descriptive words.
The word 'Western' is no longer helpful, descriptive, or accurate in the least, and if there's one thing the European canon (and most canons) can offer it's an appreciation for clarity and truthfulness in language. West of what? of who? If Euro-U.S. is Western in relation to the 'Middle' or 'Far' East, how do the intellectual contributions and geo-political activities of Africa and South America fit into the equation? Let's stop trying to hold on to a language that celebrates the geographic orientation and narrow worldview of a century ago, and embrace language that describes how the cultures and polities of the world relate to one another now.
Posted by: Hannah at May 31, 2008 9:06:35 PM
Ok. I overstated it when I said that reading books in translation is dubious. Fine, some translations are very worthwhile, but don't delude yourself that you have read the original if you have only read a translation -- even the Bible. (Confession -- I myself don't read Russian or Greek or Hebrew, to name a of the thousands of languages I don't read -- but, I do know enough to know that I it would be desirable to do so if I truly wanted to appreciate the work.)
It is not so much that I would wish to disparage reading books in translation per se, as to point out the shallowness of a so-called "great books education" without foreign languages.
Reading great books in their original language is and always was the goal of the Oxford Greats program, and of the German education that produced Einstein (who contrary to myth was very good at them) and at its best gave a chance to students of all social classes (unlike Oxford and Cambridge -- or Harvard), because, among other things, it was understood that until you begin to learn another language you cannot begin to know your own --
Why can't that still be a goal, or at least an ideal of education -- as indeed it has been for thousands of years, in almost every other country but this one? Ironically, we are so out of touch with our cultural past that we forget that important information.
Studying languages give you the tools to read the great books and potentially to expand the canon.
Posted by: harold at Jun 1, 2008 12:17:36 AM
Readers of this thread might be interested in this interview with David Allen White of the US Naval Academy and John Mark Reynolds of Biola University: Hugh Hewitt's lifetime book reading list, or what you want every college freshman and sophomore to read. It includes this bit on translation:
HH: ... Now first a question about translations, and then back to the list. As an English speaker, obviously Shakespeare and Gettysburg and the Second Inaugural are accessible to us in a way that they aren’t to non-native speakers. Does translation stand in the way, or does it give you pause for any of these particular works, David Allen White?DAW: Translation is, I think, really a problem, Hugh, when it comes to poetry, the reason being poetry is verbal music, so you need the sound to get the fullness of the experience. Robert Frost said poetry is that which gets lost in translation. Therefore, it does make a difference. But we’re fortunate. Almost every age has had really fine translations of the classics. So it’s a matter of doing a little snooping around, asking a little bit, and finding out in our own time, who the best translators are, and using their translations, you’ll get as close to the original as it’s possible to get.
HH: John Mark Reynolds, do you share that belief that you can, in fact, get to the Odyssey through any translation? Or does it have to be a particular one?
JMR: You can get to the Odyssey through…you can get to the ideas of the Odyssey through any translation. What you’re going to miss, and this is the mistake that a lot of people make, for example, when they want to read the New Testament, they think if they learn Greek, that the translators, they’re going to find stuff in the New Testament that wasn’t there before. But we’ve got really fine English translations to the New Testament, really fine idea translations of the Iliad or Odyssey. What you miss are Greek word orderings which also matter, which help you understand not hidden messages, but hidden nuances and emphasis. So you can’t really read the Iliad or the Odyssey, or even the New Testament, and get everything a native speaker gets, but you can get the big ideas.
Posted by: Timothy at Jun 1, 2008 1:27:41 PM
Yes, I agree. But style and nuance are not nothing. And its more than that. For example, geist -- in German means both spirit and culture. Dichtung means poetry both oral and written. Science has other connotations in other languages than it does in ours, where the meaning tends to be limited to "experimental science" -- as opposed to generally rigorous scholarship and so on.
The "great books" project -- worthwhile as it indisputably is to read great books and discuss them together -- is peculiarly American in that it was drawn up with as much of a view to (corporate) fund raising and merchandising (the set of books for purchase) as to improving public knowledge and it has the defects of its genesis.
Posted by: harold at Jun 2, 2008 4:11:35 PM
