Great Books of the Western World, 60 volumes

Great Books of The Western World, 60 volumes

Information... Knowledge... Understanding... Wisdom...

 

From the ancient classics to the masterpieces of the 20th century, the Great Books are all the introduction you’ll ever need to the ideas, stories and discoveries that have shaped modern civilization. This collection of 517 classics in 60 beautifully bound volumes is color-coded into four subject categories: literature, history, philosophy, and science. And since this edition includes works from 20th century authors, it’s the most up-to-date collection of the Great Books ever.

 

Product Details

 

Reading and understanding great works by history’s outstanding minds has always been considered the substance of a liberal education. The Great Books of the Western World has been acclaimed as the greatest publishing venture of the 20th Century. The set now consists of 60 volumes, with 517 works by 130 authors spanning 30 centuries, on a total of 37,000 pages containing 29 million words. Among the Great Books` 130 authors, 47 are writers of imaginative literature; 29 are masters of mathematics and/or the natural sciences; 28 are historians or social scientists, and 28 or more are philosophers and/or theologians. (This totals 132 because William James and Alfred North Whitehead have made contributions in both of the latter two subject categories).

 

Volume Details  

 

Volumes 1 and 2 of this collection is the Syntopicon, a unique two-volume guide (not sold separately) that enables you to investigate a particular idea and compare what different authors have to say about it. The Syntopicon comprises a new kind of reference work -- accomplishing for ideas what the dictionary accomplishes for words and the encyclopaedia accomplishes for facts. Also included is the Great Conversation, featuring fascinating background information, extensive timelines, photos, and quotes from the classic works and their authors.

 

The following are samples of great thoughts through the ages:

5th Century B.C. - Euripides

"--our ancestors handled these matters well by banning their murderers from public sight, forbidding them to meet or speak to anyone. But the point is this: they purged their guilt by banishment, not death. And by so doing, they stopped that endless vicious cycle of murder and revenge."

--- Orestes

17th Century -- Locke

"Every man in the state of Nature has the power to kill a murderer, both to deter others from doing the like injury -- and also to secure men from the attempts of a criminal who -- hath, by the unjust violence and slaughter he hath committed upon one, declared war against all mankind."

---Concerning Civil Government

20th Century -- Shaw

"--the human fact remains that the burning of Joan of Arc was a horror, and that a historian who would defend it would defend anything. The final criticism of its physical side is implied in refusal of the Marquesas islanders to be persuaded that the English did not eat Joan. Why, they ask, should anyone take the trouble to roast a human being except with that object? They cannot conceive its being a pleasure. As we have no answer for them that is not shameful to us, let us blush for our more complicated and pretentious savagery--"

Special colors on the Great Books` spines guide you quickly to the four subject areas:

 

GREEN: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, and Poetry
Volume 3	Homer
Volume 4	Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, Aristophanes
Volume 12	Virgil
Volume 19	Dante, Chaucer
Volume 22	Rabelais
Volume 24	Shakespeare l
Volume 25	Shakespeare ll
Volume 27	Cervantes
Volume 29	Milton
Volume 31	Molière, Racine
Volume 34	Swift, Voltaire, Diderot
Volume 45	Goethe, Balzac
Volume 46	Austen, George Eliot
Volume 47	Dickens
Volume 48	Melville, Twain
Volume 51	Tolstoy
Volume 52	Dostoevsky, Ibsen
Volume 59	Henry James, Shaw, Conrad, Chekhov, Pirandello, Proust, Cather, Mann, Joyce
Volume 60	Woolf, Kafka, Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, O`Neill, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Brecht, Hemingway, Orwell, Beckett

RED: Philosophy and Religion                                                                                                   

Volume 6	Plato
Volume 7	Aristotle l
Volume 8	Aristotle ll
Volume 11	Lucretius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus
Volume 16	Augustine
Volume 17	Aquinas l
Volume 18	Aquinas ll
Volume 20	Calvin
Volume 28	Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza
Volume 30	Pascal
Volume 33	Locke, Berkeley, Hume
Volume 39	Kant
Volume 43	Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche
Volume 55	William James, Bergson, Dewey, Whitehead, Russell, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Barth

BLUE: History, Politics, Economics, and Ethics

Volume 5	Herodotus, Thucydides
Volume 13	Plutarch
Volume 14	Tacitus
Volume 21	Machiavelli, Hobbes
Volume 23	Erasmus, Montaigne
Volume 35	Montesquieu, Rousseau
Volume 36	Adam Smith
Volume 37	Gibbon l
Volume 38	Gibbon ll
olume 40	J. S. Mill
Volume 41	Boswell
Volume 44	Tocqueville
Volume 50	Marx, Engels
Volume 57	Veblen, Tawney, Keynes
Volume 58	Frazer, Weber, Huizinga, Levi-Strauss

GREY: Mathematics and Natural Sciences
Volume 9	Hippocrates, Galen
Volume 10	Euclid, Archimedes, Nicomachus
Volume 15	Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler
Volume 26	Gilbert, Galileo, Harvey
Volume 32	Newton, Huygens
Volume 42	Lavoisier, Faraday
Volume 49	Darwin
Volume 53	William James
Volume 54	Freud
Volume 56	Poincare, Planck, Whitehead, Einstein, Eddington, Bohr, Hardy, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Dobzhansky, Waddington