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'Introduction to Classics' reading group

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Non fiction tho ;-;
Reply 41
Original post by Arithmeticae
Non fiction tho ;-;


Chin up, it's not that bad. There must be a reason people still read these books after all this time :-)


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Original post by Krollo
Chin up, it's not that bad. There must be a reason people still read these books after all this time :-)


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Classics don't just mean fiction, you could throw a bit of serious stuff in there! Need to start reading up on classical era philosophy :colone:
Original post by Arithmeticae
Classics don't just mean fiction, you could throw a bit of serious stuff in there! Need to start reading up on classical era philosophy :colone:


Actually yeah, I wouldn't mind either. I'm taking philosophy (hopefully) next year so it might come in handy.
Reply 44
Sorry, I misunderstood! I thought you were bemoaning the inclusion of non-fiction. I definitely want to include some non-fiction; shall I bother putting a list together or can we work it out as we go along?


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Original post by Krollo
Sorry, I misunderstood! I thought you were bemoaning the inclusion of non-fiction. I definitely want to include some non-fiction; shall I bother putting a list together or can we work it out as we go along?


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Haha, no way! You can start if you want, I'll try and get some suggestions down :smile:

Just to clarify, do you mean classic era books or books that we consider classics, because there's not too many old non fiction books I can name off the top of my head (I do know some, just that it might require a bit of digging to find them :tongue:)
(edited 9 years ago)
Original post by Jalal Uddin
Actually yeah, I wouldn't mind either. I'm taking philosophy (hopefully) next year so it might come in handy.


Erm, lemme think...

Praise of Folly - Erasmus
The Selfish Gene - Dawkins (not sure if this counts as classics, but still :tongue:)
Economy and Society - Weber
Leviathan - Hobbes
Meditation on First Philosophy - Descartes
Critique of Pure Reason - Kant

I'll have some more in a bit :colone:
Reply 47
Original post by Arithmeticae
Haha, no way! You can start if you want, I'll try and get some suggestions down :smile:

Just to clarify, do you mean classic era books or books that we consider classics, because there's not too many old non fiction books I can name off the top of my head (I do know some, just that it might require a bit of digging to find them :tongue:)


I suppose it would be difficult to justify anything post-1950 as a classic, purely because we haven't had time to integrate it into our society (awful turn of phrase, I know, but you get my point). And to clarify I definitely don't want to restrict it to the Romans and Greeks (they have their uses, but a lot of good stuff has been written after Christ too). I'll see if I can get some philosophy in a list.

One problem I've noticed with a lot of classics lists is the focus on getting the complete works of one author, as opposed to a variety. It's not a terrible idea, it might just get a bit tedious, particularly with the heavy stuff like Kant. I tell you, that's somewhere the Greeks and Romans have Renaissance-types beaten.

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Original post by Krollo
I suppose it would be difficult to justify anything post-1950 as a classic, purely because we haven't had time to integrate it into our society (awful turn of phrase, I know, but you get my point). And to clarify I definitely don't want to restrict it to the Romans and Greeks (they have their uses, but a lot of good stuff has been written after Christ too). I'll see if I can get some philosophy in a list.

One problem I've noticed with a lot of classics lists is the focus on getting the complete works of one author, as opposed to a variety. It's not a terrible idea, it might just get a bit tedious, particularly with the heavy stuff like Kant. I tell you, that's somewhere the Greeks and Romans have Renaissance-types beaten.

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N'awwwwww, but Dawkins! 'The Selfish Gene' tho :colone:

Yeah I guess, but what about the books that have already had a large influence on us?

I've posted a few suggestions above, I'll try and get some more :tongue:
Reply 49
Philosophy

Short works (dialogues, excerpts etc.)

Plato - Charmides, Lysis, Laches, Protagoras, Euthydemus, Cratylus, Phaedrus, Ion, Symposium, Meno, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Gorgias, Timaeus, Critias, Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Philebus, Laws, The Seventh Letter
Aristotle - Categories, On Interpretation, Topics, On Sophistical Refutations, Physics, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption, Meteorology, On Sense and the Reminiscence, On Sleep and Sleeplessness, On Dreams, On Prophesying, On Longevity and Shortness of Life, On Youth and Old Age, On Life and Death, On Breathing
John Erskine, "The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent"
William Clifford, "The Ethics of Belief"
William James, "The Will to Believe", "The Sentiment of Rationality"
John Dewey, "The Process of Thought" from How We Think
Epicurus, "Letter to Herodotus"; "Letter to Menoeceus"
Epictetus, The Enchiridion
Walter Pater, "The Art of Life" from The Renaissance
Plutarch, "Contentment"
Cicero, "On Friendship"; "On Old Age"
Francis Bacon, "Of Truth"; "Of Death"; "Of Adversity"; "Of Love"; "Of Friendship"; "Of Anger"
George Santayana, "Lucretius"; "Goethe's Faust"
Henry Adams, "St. Thomas Aquinas" from Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
Voltaire, "The Philosophy of Common Sense"
John Stuart Mill, "Nature"
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature"; "Self-Reliance"; "Montaigne; or, the Skeptic"
William Hazlitt, "On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth"
Thomas Browne, "Immortality" from Urn-Burial


Medium sized works

Aristotle - Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics
Aquinas - Treatise on God, Treatise on the Trinity, Treatise on the Creation, Treatise on the Angels, Treatise of the Work of the Six Days, Treatise on Man, Treatise on the Divine Government, Treatise on the Last End, Treatise on Human Acts, Treatise on Habits, Treatise on Law, Treatise on Grace, Treatise on Faith, Hope and Charity, Treatise on Active and Contemplative, Treatise on the States of Life, Treatise on the Incarnation, Treatise on the Sacraments, Treatise on the Resurrection, Treatise on the Last Things
Bacon - Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum, New Atlantis
Descartes - Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, Meditations on First Philosophy, Objections Against the Meditations, and Replies
Spinoza - Ethics
William James: Pragmatism
Henri Bergson: Introduction to Metaphysics
John Dewey: Experience and Education
Alfred North Whitehead: Science and the Modern World
Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy
Martin Heidegger - What is Metaphysics?”
Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations
Karl Barth - The Word of God and the Word of Man



Ridiculously long works

Plato - Republic
Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, The Athenian Constitution,Rhetoric, On Poetics
Lucretius - The Way Things Are
Epictetus - The Discourses
Marcus Aurelius - The Meditations
Plotinus - The Six Enneads
St Augustine - Confessions, City of God, Christian Doctrine
Calvin - Institutes of the Christian Religion
Erasmus - Praise of Folly
Montaigne -The Essays
Pascal - The Provincial Letters, Pensees
Locke - A Letter Concerning Toleration Concerning Civil Government, Second Essay, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Berkeley - The Principles of Human Knowledge
Hume - An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Montesquieu - The Spirit of Laws
Rousseau - On the Origin of Inequality, On Political Economy, The Social Contract
Kant - The Critique of Pure Reason, The Critique of Practical Reason, The Critique of Judgment
John Stuart Mill -On Liberty, Representative Government, Utilitarianism
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - The Philosophy of Right, The Philosophy of History
Soren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling
Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil

There were a lot of things that were hard to categorise, but I think this is a decent summary of the philosophical classics. It is worryingly long - how many classics can there be??



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Reply 50
Original post by Arithmeticae
N'awwwwww, but Dawkins! 'The Selfish Gene' tho :colone:

Yeah I guess, but what about the books that have already had a large influence on us?

I've posted a few suggestions above, I'll try and get some more :tongue:


Modern classics definitely have their place, and I don't see why we shouldn't include them, as long as we include a range of time periods. I'd quite like to read the Dawkins books to be honest, so that can definitely go on the list.


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Original post by Krollo
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Also, I think a nice idea would be to structure the books in a 'logical' order.

In most cases, there's going to be some that are easier to start off with and others that require a wealth of background knowledge, so shouldn't we account for this when making the list? Just my thoughts on the matter :tongue:
Reply 52
Original post by Arithmeticae
Also, I think a nice idea would be to structure the books in a 'logical' order.

In most cases, there's going to be some that are easier to start off with and others that require a wealth of background knowledge, so shouldn't we account for this when making the list? Just my thoughts on the matter :tongue:


Good idea. I think doing things chronologically would help, but equally shorter works and essays tend not to require much background knowledge (indeed, the essay collections I have used for the list have had the purpose of introducing the lay reader to the classics). There is definitely a hierarchy though, I'll go through and see if I can sort it out.

Equally, certain works share such a common theme that they naturally go together, e.g. Plato's Apology and Aristophanes' Clouds both deal with why people were suspicious of Socrates. 'On Being the Right Size' and 'Micromegas' both concern things that are much larger than we expect, and the effects of this. Micromegas and Cosmic View both concern the place of humans in the universe.

Equally, Kafka's Metamorphosis and Animal Farm both concern the relationship between humans and animals, as does Huxley's essay 'On The Relation of Man to the Lower Animals', which leads to Darwin's Autobiography and then On the Origin of Species, and from that to Dobzhansky, and then to Richard Dawkins.

Alternatively you could go from Animal Farm to the Communist Manifesto, to the Road to Serfdom, to JK Jerome's The New Utopia, to More's Utopia, to Candide, to Leibniz's Monadology, or to Gulliver's Travels.

Certainly some of these books need primers, but for the most part you can leap from book to book, never really needing much previous knowledge. Each book naturally suggests either those that influenced it, or those that it influenced, and by following around these trails you can end up covering a lot of the essays and books.

Obviously, some subjects end up on a bit of an island (I'm thinking of maths specifically) so we may have to engineer it so that each subject gets a fair treatment.

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Reply 53
So, I think we agreed on starting with the Metamorphosis next week. (Nabokov wrote a nice lecture on it too.) Any ideas for stuff to move onto? In terms of linked groups:

Plato's Apology + Aristophanes' Clouds
Elements, Book I + The Sand Reckoner
Candide + Monadology
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar + Plutarch's Julius Caesar
The Communist Manifesto + The Road to Serfdom (excerpts)
On Old Age and Friendship (Cicero)
The Prince


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Reply 54
Reply 55
Original post by Angury


Original post by sarcastic-sal


Jalal Uddin


Original post by GuanyinBuddha


Original post by clever_swine


Original post by edgarcats


Original post by Arithmeticae




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Is everyone happy to get started within the next few days?
Reply 56
Original post by Jalal Uddin

Sorry -forgot to quote you in first time round. See above.


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Last exam is tomorrow :redface:
Is there a list of books that we should begin with?
Reply 58
Original post by Jalal Uddin
Last exam is tomorrow :redface:
Is there a list of books that we should begin with?


Well, a few people above have proposed Kafka's Metamorphosis, so I was thinking of starting there for a week and seeing how things go. We don't seem to have decided much beyond that; I'd like to propose Plato's Apology, have you got any ideas?


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Original post by Krollo
Well, a few people above have proposed Kafka's Metamorphosis, so I was thinking of starting there for a week and seeing how things go. We don't seem to have decided much beyond that; I'd like to propose Plato's Apology, have you got any ideas?
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Ew, not Metamorphosis please. Teacher talked to us about that, sounded terrible.

Sorry, no suggestions atm, my plate is a little full :tongue:

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