Britannica Brings Great Books to E-Book Format

Reported at Market Wired [January 22, 2009 16:19 ET].

"Fully searchable and extensively interlinked, the electronic-book edition of the set enables readers to find anything in the corpus with a simple keyword search, making it easier to navigate and conduct research on the contents of the set, in addition to reading in the conventional way.

"The product also contains a complete set of hypertext links between the Syntopicon, the two-volume idea index to the Great Books, and the places in the main text that the Syntopicon entries refer to."

#GreatBooksOfTheWesternWorld

But what is it for?

The Economist, January 15, 2009 reports

When Roberto Mangabeira Unger swapped life as a philosopher and Harvard law professor for a place in Brazil’s government, he was given a small ministry from which to think about the future. [ ] His most recent plan is a blueprint for Brazil’s armed forces—an unusual task for a man whose previous life involved writing long, gnomic books about “the radicalisation of indeterminacy”.

--Terrence Berres

God: Philosophers weigh in

Alex Byrne in Boston Review, January/February 2009

Arguments for the existence of God are usually divided into those whose premises may be known from the armchair, and those whose premises are the result of experiment and observation. The best-known armchair argument is called (following Kant’s unhelpful terminology) the “ontological argument,” while the design argument (also called the “teleological argument”) is the main representative of empirical arguments.

---

Adler On: God

Defined, Adler's Philosophical Dictionary (1995)

How to Think About God: A Guide for the 20th Century Pagan (1980, 1982, 1988, 1991) especially Chapter 9

--Terrence Berres

Messengers in the modern world

The Economist, December 18, 2008, on the current status of one of The Great Ideas

The inexorable progress of the Enlightenment, though it has sent devils packing and committed nymphs and sprites to the realms of silliness, has never managed to stamp out angels. They survive, and are taken seriously.

--Terrence Berres

See Adler On: Angels

A philosopher's ideas about Sleep

An interview with Bernard Shaw by Eimar O'Duffy

The Great Ideas: The University of Chicago and the Ideal of Liberal Education

An Exhibition in the Department of Special Collections
The University of Chicago Library
May 1, 2002 - September 6, 2002

Organization of the Exhibition:
Introduction
1. General Honors at Columbia University
2. General Honors Comes to Chicago
3. From General Education to the College Curriculum
4. Creating a Great Curriculum
5. Spreading the Gospel
6. "Western" Culture
7. Spreading the Word
8. Back to Chicago

--Terrence Berres

RichardDawkins.net

An excerpt from Intellect: Mind Over Matter is being discussed over at the Richard Dawkins message board.

-Mark Brawner

Syntopiconline

Britannica blog is in the midst of a series of posts on the Great Books, Britannica's Great Books, and Alex Beam's book on both. To one post Michael Ross added a comment that includes this news.

The Great Books [of the Western World] too will soon be available in e-book format, searchable and linked to the Syntopicon. They will be available through most libraries, we hope, as well as from from EB, by the end of the year.

--Terrence Berres

Mortimer Adler in Life's image archive

The Associated Press reported

Google Inc. has opened an online photo gallery that will feature millions of images from Life magazine's archives that have never been seen by the public before.

The new service, available at http://images.google.com/hosted/life, debuted Tuesday with about 2 million photos. Eventually, Google plans to scan all 10 million photos from Life's library so they can be viewed on any computer with an Internet connection.

...

The photos can be printed out for free as long as they aren't being used as part of an attempt to make money. Time Warner Inc., Life's parent company, hopes to make money by selling high-resolution, framed prints. The orders will be processed through Qoop.com.

(via Ryan Sayre Patrico at First Things)

--Terrence Berres

Mortimer J. Adler's MySpace page

--Terrence Berres

The happiness of free people

Click on the title link to go to the great ideas forum if you would like to discuss the implications of the November issue of Great Ideas Online http://www.thegreatideas.org/21w/TGIO496.pdf , where Dr. Adler explains the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia or happiness.

As usual, I am grateful to Dr. Adler for stimulating essays, but find I totally disagree with his conclusions and most of his premises. In this case, I have argued that the Aristotelian definition of happiness is suitable only for a nation of rulers and subjects and propose an alternate definition, based on Stoic philosophy which I will argue is more suitable for a free people.

In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg: Aristotle's 'Politics'

The history of ideas discussed by Melvyn Bragg and guests including Philosophy, science, literature, religion and the influence these ideas have on us today.

IOT: Aristotle's Politics
Thursday, November 06, 2008 3:30 AM
Melvyn Bragg discusses Aristotle's 'Politics' - a two and a half thousand year old collection of notes that have cast a very long shadow in political philosophy. He is joined by Angie Hobbs, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick; Paul Cartledge, AG Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge; and Annabel Brett, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge.

-Mark Brawner

Against Intuition

Christopher Shea in The Chronicle Review on the experimental-philosophy [x-phi] movement

A key question for experimental psychology is how it proposes to get from descriptive findings to philosophically sound conclusions about what we ought to do, or what ought to count as sound knowledge.

So far, it appears, the discipline tends to be better at tearing down such conclusions, or trying to.

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

--Terrence Berres

John Cleese - The Scientists - 2008

--Terrence Berres

A Great Idea at the Time

Via Apocaloopsis, the publisher's notice of A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, by Alex Beam

The Great Books of Western Civilization [sic], fifty-four volumes chosen by intellectuals at the University of Chicago, began as an educational movement, and evolved into a successful marketing idea. Why did a million American households buy books by Hippocrates and Nicomachus from door-to-door salesmen? And how and why did the great books fall out of fashion?

Going Off the Rawls

David Gordon in The American Conservative, July 28, 2008

This is key to [John] Rawls’s theory: whatever arises from a fair procedure is just.

But what is a fair procedure? Rawls again has an ingenious approach, his famous veil of ignorance. ...

Rawls’s veil of ignorance generalizes the point of this example. He asks that we imagine a situation, which he calls the original position, in which people do not know their own abilities, tastes, and conceptions of the good. Under this limit, individuals motivated by self-interest endeavor to arrive at principles of justice. People behind the veil of ignorance are self-interested but in crucial respects ignorant.

Great Unread Books: Which classic are you ashamed to admit you have never read?

The Telegraph, July 22, 2008

Respectable authors made shameful confessions at Ways With Words festival; watch them below. Now it's your turn: which book are you most embarrassed to admit you have never read?

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

--Terrence Berres

All the Answers: The quiz-show scandals—and the aftermath. by Charles Van Doren

I was considered well spoken, well educated, handsome—the very image of a young man that parents would like their son to be. I was also thought to be the ideal teacher, which is to say patient, thoughtful, trustworthy, caring. In addition, I was making a small fortune. And then—well, this is what happened:

Mind Over What’s the Matter

Simon Blackburn, in yesterday's New York Times, reviews Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, by Susan Neiman.

Neiman, an American who is currently the director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin, boldly asserts that when Marxism, postmodernism, theory and fundamentalism challenge the Enlightenment they invariably come off second best. I agree, and I wish more people did so.

Saying challengers to the Enlightenment "invariably come off second best" seems inconsistent with "wishing" more people were convinced of it.

--Terrence Berres

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar, Summer 2008

The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

(via Shark and Shepherd)

Education: the deflationary view

Stanley Fish in the Yale Alumni Magazine July/August 2008

So what is it that institutions of higher learning are supposed to do? My answer is simple. College and university teachers can (legitimately) do two things: (1) introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry that had not previously been part of their experience; and (2) equip those same students with the analytical skills -- of argument, statistical modeling, laboratory procedure -- that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research after a course is over

.

After 49 years Charles Van Doren opens up . . .

At the 2001 memorial service of Mortimer Adler, a close friend of Van Doren's father, the famous writer and poet Mark Van Doren, the disgraced son talked of "the time when I fell down, face down in the mud, and [Adler] picked me up, brushed me off, and gave me a job." I interviewed Van Doren about Adler last year, and he called the late 1950s the time "when my life changed." He said he was working on a memoir, which he declined to discuss.

An Original Confession

Darwin revised the text of the “Origin” extensively each time the book was republished in his lifetime; by the 6th (and last) edition, the text had evolved considerably. The final paragraph of the 6th edition differs from that of the first in that it includes mention of “the creator.” The relevant sentence of the 6th edition reads “…having been originally breathed by the creator into a few forms or into one…”

Who Is the Greatest Modern-Day Thinker?

Via a reader, Stephen J. Dubner in Freakonomics at The New York Times relays this question from a college student in a "core" (great books?) curriculum.

Once you’ve thought about what it means to be a thinker, then comes the hard part of thinking about who best fits the description.

Which includes the criteria for greatness, and maybe even for "Modern-Day".

So who are your nominees, and why?

Naming U. of C. research center after Nobel Prize winner has faculty split

U. of C. is the University of Chicago, and the Nobel Prize winner is Milton Friedman (1912-2006). Jodi S. Cohen reported in the Chicago Tribune, June 18, 2008,

In a letter to U. of C. President Robert Zimmer, 101 professors--about 8 percent of the university's full-time faculty--said they feared that having a center named after the conservative, free-market economist could "reinforce among the public a perception that the university's faculty lacks intellectual and ideological diversity."

(via "Diogenes" at Off the Record)

--Terrence Berres

Book culture without books?

David Carter reviews The Book is Dead (Long Live the Book) by Sherman Young, in Australian Humanities Review, March 2008

It seems appropriate to be writing this in Tokyo where a recent bestseller list showed that five of the year's most successful novels, including the top three, were first written to be read on mobile phones before being republished in book form.

(via Milt's File)

--Terrence Berres

Van Doren on Adler (2008)

In the newly-published edition of Charles Van Doren's 1985 book The Joy of Reading, one of the recommended works continues to be the Mortimer J. Adler's Syntopicon to Great Books of the Western World. Mr. Van Doren's revised essay includes this (p. 444).

...The work stands as a monument to the efforts of critical philosophy in our century that will long endure.

I wrote that sentence twenty years ago, and I no longer believe it to be true, although it should be. ... We talked on the phone a few weeks before [Adler's death] ... I recalled the deep sadness that accompanied his statement in that last conversation to the effect that everything he had worked and fought for throughout his life had failed. I said "No, no!" but the statement was in large part correct. ... I'm not sure that Adler's vision will ever be seen again, and I think we have lost something rich and beautiful.

(via Apocaloopsis)

--Terrence Berres

Standing Up For What You Don't Believe

Steve Fuller in TPM Online

I agreed to serve as an expert “rebuttal” witness in the first US trial to test ID [Intelligent Design] as fit for public science instruction, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005). In other words, my testimony addressed the arguments of those who thought ID had no place in science classes.

--Terrence Berres

The Reach of an Ancient Greek

Anthony Gottlieb in The Wall Street Journal, May 17, 2008, reviews The Music of Pythagoras, by Kitty Ferguson

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

--Terrence Berres

One College That’s Getting It Right

Michael Linton at the First Things weblog about some school in Maryland.

--Terrence Berres