Books read January through December 1965
| Author | Joyce, James |
|---|---|
| Publication | Unknown |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Religion; Catholicism |
| When Read | January 1965 |
See abstract in 1997-12.01.
See comment in 1997-12.01
| Author | Thurber, James |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1933 |
| Number of Pages | 133 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | January 1965 |
Thurber's comic autobiography of his youth and family in Columbus Ohio.
I remember that I enjoyed this book but don't remember any more about it.
| Author | Waugh, Evelyn |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1048 |
| Number of Pages | 176 |
| Genres | Fiction; Satire |
| When Read | February 1965 |
This is a comic satire about a love triangle among morticians in the death business.
I have only the vaguest memory of this story but I think that, after World War II, the U.S. commercial culture, already huge, expanded even further. Waugh was making fun of it by applying it even to the work of morticians. I don't know if a story like this would work as well in 2020.
| Author | Camus, Albert |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1946 |
| Number of Pages | 154 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 1965 |
This was one of the seminal works of existentialism. I may have been introduced to it in a French class, but I don't remember for sure.
The main character, Meursault, living in Algiers, takes no interest and expresses no anguish at his mother's funeral. He acts in a detached way. He kills a North African man and is sentenced to death for it, but he seems uninterested in anything.
55 or so years after reading it, I can only imagine my reaction to the book. What I imagine is that, on the one hand I would have been repelled by the passivity and lack of empathy of Meursault and on the other hand I would have felt that I had been exposed to important new ideas about the nature and meaning, or lack of meaning, of life. I know that I tried hard to understand the notion of "existentialism" that was said to be displayed in the book (although I now know that Camus himself didn't consider himself to be existensialist.)
The world is full of books and full of ideas. If only we had the time to read and learn them all and the memory to keep all of the ideas present in mind.
| Author | Anouilh, Jean |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Fry, Christoppher |
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1952 |
| Number of Pages | 103 |
| Genres | Theater play |
| When Read | March 1965 |
Anouilh's play was about Joan of Arc, translated as The Lark. I recorded the French title in my notes, so perhaps I bumbled my way through it in French, dictionary in hand, in one of my French classes. Or maybe I read it in English from an edition that retained the French title.
It's not a long work. I could be persuaded to read it again and write up my real, 73 year old reaction rather than imagine an 18 year old reaction. However I'm not going to do that now.
| Author | Spanier, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Praeger Publishers |
| Copyright Date | 1962 |
| Number of Pages | 372 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | United States |
| When Read | March 1965 |
Spanier recounts the history of American foreign policy since the war, primarily as it pertains to the struggle between the U.S. and its communist adversaries in Europe and Asia. There are chapters on each of the major conflicts and developments - the Marshall Plan, NATO, China, Korea, Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam, and more.
The book appears to have gone through at least 15 editions. I've given the copyright date, 1962, of the last edition that I'm sure was available when I actually read the book.
I kept trying to keep up with current history.
Praeger was founded by an Austrian immigrant to the United States in 1949, largely as an anti-communist press. Frederick Praeger (see his New York Times obituary in 1994) was deeply concerned about what the Red Army was doing in Eastern Europe, stamping out all resistance, all dissent, all freedom of the press, and all efforts to establish democracy. In retrospect I think that the books I saw that were published by Praeger were attempts at serious and objective history, not McCarthyite anti-communism.
| Author | Hume, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | The Library of the Liberal Arts, 1957 |
| Copyright Date | 1751 |
| Number of Pages | lxiv + 158 |
| Extras | Edited with an introduction by Charles W. Hendel, Clark Professor of Moral Philosphy and Metaphysics at Yale University |
| Extras | A dialogue, by Hume |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Philosophy |
| Keywords | Ethics |
| When Read | April 1965 |
Hume writes about the general nature of morality, why it is important to us, how it relates to justice, and other matters.
I don't really remember the book but do remember the basics of Hume's position. I would have read this for one of my early philosophy courses at the University of Pittsburgh. Perhaps it was with Professor Kurt Baier, a great teacher and philosopher, though it is possible it was with someone else.
Hume considered sentiment to be at the foundation of morals. We are good to other people because we sympathize with them. Our moral ideas are not founded on some rational principle as Kant would later argue, but on natural human feelings.
Hume's position didn't work for me when I first read it. I thought that if morality was just a matter of feelings, then maybe it didn't apply to people who didn't have those feelings and they were not more wrong than the rest of and we were not more right. Mere feelings seemed like a weak and unstable basis for a guide to human action. I wanted some rationalist principle that would enable us to clearly establish right from wrong and clearly explain why the one was right and the other was wrong. It was only later that I came to the position that I have held for many decades now, that morality is founded on many principles. All of them are right, but at the same time, none of them is sufficient by itself to answer all moral questions. We have to appeal to reason, sentiment, habit, social behavior, and more. I have no doubt that what Hume called "sentiment" is one of those things and that if we remove it from the list we significantly weaken our moral stance.
I've still got my copy of the book, priced at 85 cents.
| Author | Michener, James |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House |
| Copyright Date | 1959 |
| Number of Pages | 937 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | April 1965 |
Michener's epic novel covered the history of Hawaii from the first Polynesians to arrive on the island, through 19th century American Christian missionaries, the appropriation of the islands by the United States, the travail imposed by and upon the big pineapple monopoly (presumably Dole, but not explicitly identified in the book), and on through and beyond the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. The book was a runaway best seller.
I remember something of all of the above events but, surprisingly to me now, I remember best the missionaries with their Christian sexual rectitude, and the pineapple monopoly. The pineapple company was almost destroyed by a failure of the crops but they dragged up an alcoholic plant pathologist, sobered him up, and put him to work. He analyzed the complete chemical content of healthy pineapples and unhealthy ones and discovered that an element required by the pineapples was missing. It had been depleted from the soil by the intensive agriculture. I seem to recall that it was zinc, but I may be imagining that. He restored the required nutrient and the pineapple crops recovered. The company released the drunken scientist and maybe (I may be imagining this too) picked up his bar tab for the rest of his life.
I liked the book. I was not yet a snob about literature - but then I hope that if I became one, I have since shucked that affectation.
| Author | Kant, Immanuel |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Abbot, Thomas Kingsmill |
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1785 |
| Number of Pages | 84 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Philosophy |
| Keywords | Ethics |
| When Read | May 1965 |
Kant explains his famous "categorical imperative". All human beings are essentially the same. If they are the same, then they are of equal value. To do something that harms another human is tantamount to harming yourself. You cannot logically and consistently value yourself without also valuing other human beings. In effect, it seemed to me that this was an endorsement and argument for the golden rule of the bible - do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
This book has been translated into English a number of times and published under a number of different titles. For the bibliographic description of the book, I chose the published title that matched the title I wrote in my little notepad and assumed that what I read was a version of the translation done by Abbot, in 1913.
I probably read this for the same class for which I read Hume's An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Kant satisfied the requirement that I had for finding a logical justification for morals better than Hume had done - at least as far as I was concerned. Over time however I came to believe that Hume's principle, and also those of Aristotle and numbers of other philosophers, should not be dismissed. The principles underlying morality in particular and values in general emerge from multiple bases. Those bases appear differently to different people and societies, and they interact differently in different people and societies. They encompass everything from seemingly categorical imperatives to simple suggestions - in a mix that changes over time, person, and place. We can find good justifications for morality. But we can also argue about those justifications. Our conclusions will not always be the same. That's one reason why being a moral person is not a trivial job.
I found a copy of the book in my basement philosophy collection with the title Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, translated and with an introduction by Lewis White Beck. Beck was a living professor at the University of Rochester that my wife Marcia had met when she was an undergraduate there. He was head of the department. I am tempted to use this copy for the bibliographic description but the fact that I wrote down a different translation of the title suggests that I bought this copy after my reading. Perhaps I read a library copy for the class, then bought this when I saw it with a list price of 95 cents at the University of Pittsburgh bookstore.
| Author | Mill, John Stuart |
|---|---|
| Publication | The Library of Liberal Arts |
| Copyright Date | 1861 |
| Number of Pages | viii + 79 |
| Extras | Selected bibliography |
| Extras | Editor's introduction by Oskar Piest |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Philosophy |
| Keywords | Ethics |
| When Read | May 1965 |
This is Mill's seminal work on his theory that the foundation of ethics is achieving the greatest good, or if the term "good" begs the question, then let us say the greatest happiness, for the greatest number. The theory is more sophisticated than that but that's the popular formulation that sums it up.
I would need to re-read Mill to disentangle the issues raised by others and their means of addressing those issues from the issues and adjustments made by Mill himself. My recollection is that the biggest issue was fundamental human rights. If doing serious harm to an innocent person would, for some reason, provide happiness to a great many people, is it ethical to do that? Most of us would say No.
It is an important fact, I think, that we consider it to be justifiable to evaluate a theory of ethics by asking questions like, Would you (or me, or we) consider this (whatever this is) to be right or wrong? In other words, we consult our consciences and our feelings, something that Hume might have understood and accepted more than either Kant or Mill. And yet Kant can give us a logical reason for ethical behavior that transcends feelings, and Mill can give us what might be called a mathematical reason, or perhaps a sociological reason. Both Kant and Mill are therefore offering standards that are based on a sort of authority, but without the mysterious, supernatural authority of religious belief - something that I suspect that all three philosphers would agree upon as being an insecure foundation for ethics.
I'm writing all this now, 55 years after I studied the issues, and studied them only at an undergraduate level at that - though I did read more on ethics in grad school a few years later. If I were asked today to say why I believe it is important to be an ethical person, and in fact I do so believe, I would cite Aristotle, Hume, Kant, and Mill in my reasoning and still, I think, be able to make at least some of their arguments. However I'm certainly not competent to debate these issues with real, professional philosophers.
I think that we human beings ought to learn what we can about all of the things that are fundamental to being human. We should learn logic, ethics, and at least some ideas about what makes the difference between truth and falsity, rationality and irrationality, and other issues in philosophy. We should also understand what we can of the sciences, of history, of the arts, of sociology and psychology, etc. We can't all be scholars. I can't claim to be a scholar myself, but it would be a shame to be part of this great evolution of matter from non-living material, to unconscious life, to conscious, sapient, knowledgeable life, and not take advantage of the wonders that philosophy, science, history, and the other fields of knowledge that our ancestors have worked so hard to accumulate and that can give us so much.
To anyone reading these notes I say, Don't stop having fun. Enjoy life. But read. Read. Read! And learn.
(What a pompous person I can be!)
| Author | Goldsmith |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1773 |
| Number of Pages | 80 |
| Genres | Theater play; Comedy |
| When Read | June 1965 |
In Goldsmith's comedy a young woman pursues a young man who is hopelessly shy among women of his own class but bold and forthright in seducing women of the lower class. The woman pretends to be a lower class girl in order to win the affection of her target.
The play was a big hit and continued to be produced through the 19th and 20th centuries.
As with so many books from so many years ago, whatever hazy recollections I have of the original reading are supplanted by Wikipedia, Amazon, and/or other modern reviews and descriptions. Looking at those I see clearly that the class divisions in British society were acute and pervaded the sensibilities of all classes. I presume that the audience came from an educated "gentle" class, which includes any and all of the noble, gentrified, bourgeois, intellectual, and professional classes - which include people with serious money problems, as seen in Romantic Outlaws (q.v.). I am sure I would have been aware of that in 1965 but not known as much about it as I learned later. I understand that the kinds of class divisions that existed in 18th century England broke down in the 19th and especially the 20th centuries. The ideas of the play probably don't seem as funny to most of us now as they might have to the audiences in 1773.
| Author | Ionesco, Eugene |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Allen, Donald M. |
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1950 |
| Number of Pages | 32 |
| Genres | Theater play |
| When Read | June 1965 |
Eugene Ionesco (or Eugène Ionesco or Eugen Ionescu) was born in Romania but lived and worked mainly in France. This, his first play, was a short work characterized as "absurdist". Apparently, it has been performed continuously since its opening in 1950 - the longest running play, in Paris(?), in the world(?), I don't know.
The university was a liberating experience for me. I was living, if not entirely on my own, then at any rate not with parents. I was studying in classes of my choosing. I was exposed to books that went beyond what I found and selected for myself at the local branch public libraries. I was listening to professors working at an intellectual level beyond anything I had encountered in high school, and in subjects like philosophy, art history, music, anthropology, and others that were not part of a high school curriculum. My reading was expanding and my mind along with it.
| Author | Hasek, Jaroslav |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1921 |
| Number of Pages | 784 |
| Genres | Fiction; Satire |
| Keywords | World War I |
| When Read | July 1965 |
Schweik is drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army where he is either a very innocent and rather stupid man who screws up all of his orders, or is a very sophisticated and intelligent man who screws up all of his orders. It is never perfectly clear which he is.
Also published as Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk and with other character sets and transliterations. There are multiple volumes and editions.
The book became a best seller in many countries and was banned from some of them where it was feared that soldiers would read it and start following orders in literal but stupid ways.
Vladimir Voinovich's 1970 novel, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Ivan Chonkin, had much the same theme I think.
| Author | Shakespeare, William |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1597 |
| Number of Pages | 160 |
| Genres | Theater play; History |
| Keywords | England |
| When Read | July 1965 |
Shakespeare's play based on the chronicle recordings of the first part of the reign of Henry IV.
I had read two of Shakespeare's most popular plays in high school. I seem to recall that I decided to read this one because I was a history buff and wanted to see how S treated a real historical subject. If my recollection is right, I was not assigned this play in an English class but chose it myself.
| Author | Conrad, Joseph |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1902 |
| Number of Pages | 50 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Maritime; Short story |
| When Read | August 1965 |
Around 1876, a British sailing ship is contracted to carry a load of coal from Britain to Thailand. Every sort of catastrophe occurs from storm damage to leaks in the hull, loss of equipment, and an inextinguishable fire aboard. Even the rats abandoned the ship while it was in England, causing most of the crew to leave too.
The story is said to be autobiographical. Its main character, Charles Marlow, appears in the later Heart of Darkness and the story opens in the same way, with a group of seamen sitting around a table and relating stories.
After reading Heart of Darkness some time before I wanted to read another Conrad story and chose this one - maybe because I was young too.
| Author | Franklin, Benjamin |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Collier Books, 1962 |
| Copyright Date | 1791 |
| Number of Pages | 160 |
| Extras | "New introduction by Lewis Leary" |
| Extras | "Further reading" |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | August 1965 |
Franklin began his autobiography in 1771, finishing his work on it 1790. It was first published in a partial French translation, and then in English in a translation from the French, back in French again from the English, and only in 1868 (according to the Wikipedia) was an original manuscript found and published.
The bibliographic description above is taken from a copy of the autobiography that I found in my basement library. It could not have been the copy I read because it has "Fifth Printing 1970" on the verso of the title page. However I could have read the same book, found in a library, and then later found it in a bookstore and paid the 65 cent cover price to get my own copy.
As I recall, Franklin begins with his childhood in Boston and apprenticeship to his father, a printer. He left home in very young adulthood and traveled to Philadelphia, no small journey in those days. He eventually founded his own print shop and gradually became a well known and respected person in the city. One story I remember was that a man showed up at his door asking for his opinion on founding a hospital. Franklin asked some questions and wondered why the man came to him. The man answered that he went to a number of others first but each of them asked, "What does Franklin think of the idea?" He had learned that Franklin's approval would be essential to get the enterprise off the ground. Franklin did approve and also founded a subscription library - an achievement close to my own heart.
I also recall stories about his scientific discoveries. On his transatlantic voyages he dropped a bucket into the ocean attached to a long rope and inspected the contents of whatever came up from the depths. He discovered creatures not known to any of the seamen or in the books on sea life. Once he played a joke on friends in England saying that he could calm a bubbling spring by waving a wand and saying magic words. As they watched he said the words and subtly poured a vial of oil into the water from his other hand, calming the water but exciting the hell out of his friends. He went through a storm in Philadelphia, carefully noted the wind direction and the timing of the storm, then wrote to friends up and down the Atlantic coast asking them about when they saw the storm that night and which way the wind was blowing. To his surprise he found that the storm did not originate from the direction that the wind was blowing from. He hypothesized a chimney effect, with the storm sucking air out of the center of the storm and pulling it in just above the ground from all directions. It is a theory that has been confirmed by modern meteorology. He was a man of high intelligence and great intellectual curiosity, a leading scientific mind of his age, highly respected in Europe as well as America. Again as I recall, Franklin was not particularly humble in his autobiography but he really had no reason to be.
I liked this book very much and remember more of it than I do of most books that I read in this period of my life, or of many later periods too.
| Author | Descartes, Rene |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1637 |
| Number of Pages | 160 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Philosophy |
| When Read | September 1965 |
Also known by the shortened title of Discourse on Method, this is one of the foundation works of the movement that came to be called "rationalism". It includes the first publication (I think (see below)) of the famous dictum "I think, therefore I am".
Descartes uses this dictum to establish a bedrock of self-evident truth, something that cannot possibly be false. From that he attempts to produce more truths using logical derivations from what are lower level, self-evident truths.
I read this book in Professor Joseph Kockelmans' class on Rationalism in the history of philosophy. See my diary entry of May 12, 2016 for more on Kockelmans, one of my favorite professors.
I don't know whether it was me, the times in American academic philosophy, or something peculiar to the University of Pittsburgh Philosophy Department (I think it was the times in American academic philosophy), but the history of philosophy was taught as the history of philosophical ideas apart from any more general history of ideas or the social, cultural, intellectual, political, and economic climate at the time that the philosophy was written.
I now believe, that philosophical ideas are part of the more general world of ideas at the time those philosophical ideas were published. I now believe, largely because of what I read in Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 by Jonathan Israel (q.v.), that Descartes was engaged in a grand, and rather dangerous, contest with the Church over whether true knowledge comes from science and rational thought, or from revelation by God. I and others in Professor K's class objected to Descartes' bringing God into his discourse, but I now see that if he didn't, he would have been castigated and his books burned, or he may even have been physically harmed. However he was instrumental in liberating European intellectuals from religious dogma. He didn't do it by himself and he wasn't able to do it explicitly or carry it very far, but he was one of the most influential philosophers in helping others to break free of the bonds of "revealed" wisdom. That doesn't mean he was an atheist, but even the mildest and most timid deism was out of bounds in mid-17th century Europe. If Descartes held deistic views, never mind atheistic views, he would have been compelled to conceal them.
I cannot resist adding a bit from Terry Pratchett's Dodger. He wrote: "No Englishman would ever have said, 'I think, therefore I am.' Although possibly he might have said, 'I think, therefore I am, I think.'"
The diary reference below is about Joseph Kockelmans. For many more discussing Descartes, Spinoza, rationalism, and the intellectual milieu of 16th century philosophy see my notes on Radical Enlightenment in the entry listed as 2018-05.02.
| Author | Franklin, Benjamin |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | Unknown |
| Number of Pages | Unknown |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | September 1965 |
I have no memory or record of what was in this book. Looking on the Internet I see multiple publications of selected writings of Franklin ranging from a small number of pages to 1400. So I'll just record here that I read something of Franklin's after reading his autobiography.
| Author | Twain, Mark |
|---|---|
| Publication | Unknown |
| Number of Pages | Unknown |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | October 1965 |
As with Franklin's "Selected Writings", I have no idea what this was.
It's too bad that I had no library school training before 1973.
| Author | Emerson, Ralph Waldo |
|---|---|
| Publication | Unknown |
| Copyright Date | Unknown |
| Number of Pages | Unknown |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | October 1965 |
Again, a book for which my bibliographic description was insufficient and useless.
Why should I have written more about this book in my list of readings? After all, at age 19 I still remembered, or imagined that I remembered, everything I read. I also had no appreciation of the fact that I'd be looking at this list 55 years later and that the titles and editions of books would be ambiguous in the light of later publishing.
| Author | Poe, Edgar Allen |
|---|---|
| Publication | Unknown |
| Copyright Date | Unknown |
| Number of Pages | Unknown |
| Genres | Fiction; Poetry |
| When Read | October 1965 |
One more insufficiently described anthology.
| Author | Friedlaender, Walter |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Goldwater, Robert |
| Publication | Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1952 |
| Copyright Date | 1930 |
| Number of Pages | xii + 136 |
| Extras | 83 black and white halftone illustrations |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Art; History |
| When Read | November 1965 |
Friedlaender gives us the history of French painting from the beginning of the Napoleonic period (Jacques-Louis David, 1748-1825, "Oath of the Horatii") through to its aftermath (Eugène Delacroix, 1798-1863, "Medea"). The number of artists covered is not large, allowing Friedlaender to give more analysis of each one.
I took a number of courses in art history at the University of Pittsburgh. I had never been introduced to this subject before but I took a course based on the reputation of the professor and found that the Art History Department at Pitt was really excellent. I liked the professors more than the ones I met in the regular history department and wound up (IIRC) taking three courses. I believe I read this book as a part of one of those courses that concentrated on 19th century French painting. I think it was one of the assigned books for the course.
I went to the University of Pittsburgh expecting to become an industrial engineer, but it didn't take long for me to discover the worlds of philosophy, art history, music (which I had to give up in the face of students with vastly greater musical talent than I had), literature, and history. Except for literature, I knew nothing at all about the arts when I arrived at the University of Pittsburgh. Books like this and professors like the excellent man (I can't recall his name) who assigned it, opened my eyes.
Searching the Internet I saw an ad for a tenth edition of the book dated 1980 (14 years after Friedlaender's death) and containing 215 pages. The first edition, the one I still have, shows only 136 text pages, plus 83 "halftones" - a black and white dot printing technique that uses large black dots close together for dark areas and small black dots further apart for light areas. Perhaps the 83 illustrations on 83 unnumbered "plate" pages in the first edition were included in the page count for the second ed.
Working on a project for the J. Paul Getty Museum in the 1980s I learned that art historians, at least at that time and earlier, did not trust the colors in color reproductions. It was difficult enough to get them right on posters and much more difficult to get them right in books containing prints of photos made at different times on different kinds of film with different cameras, lighting, and other shooting conditions and on printing presses running many hours with different batches of ink. Having black and white instead of color would have been a recognition of the color accuracy problem rather than simply a cheaper way to represent the paintings, especially so in 1952.
| Editor | Whicher, George Frisbie |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: D.C. Heath and Co. |
| Copyright Date | 1953 |
| Number of Pages | 120 |
| Extras | Suggestions for further reading |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Essays |
| Keywords | United States |
| When Read | November 1965 |
Whicher, a professor at Amherst College, edited this collection of essays on the Bryan / MacKinley election in 1896.
I still have the book. I believe it was assigned in a class in American history at the University of Pittsburgh. Looking at it now it reminds me of how deeply divided politics has been in the United States throughout our history. The attacks that partisans of Bryan and MacKinley hurled against each other are not so different in character from those that partisans of Clinton and Bush made in 2016. Deep division is a recurring theme in American history and in the histories of other countries too.
| Editor | Kennedy, Gail |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: D.C. Heath and Co. |
| Copyright Date | 1949 |
| Number of Pages | 116 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Essays |
| Keywords | United States |
| When Read | December 1965 |
A collection of essays concerning the transformation of the U.S. into a deeply class divided industrial state after the Civil War. The essays were not written for this small volume but rather are collected from important authors living contemporaneously with the changes in the U.S. that the book describes.
As I understand it the "Gospel of Wealth" was originally a prescription for what rich people should do in order to serve society. Later however, I thought the phrase came to signify a kind of sanctification of wealth - people were rich or poor because they deserved to be rich or poor. God ordained the socio-economic order.
I would have read this collection of essays as part of the same U.S. history class for which I read the preceding one, William Jennings Bryan and the Campaign of 1896.
| Editor | Handlin, Oscar |
|---|---|
| Publication | Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965 |
| Copyright Date | 1959 |
| Number of Pages | 206 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Essays |
| Keywords | United States |
| When Read | December 1965 |
Another book on American history. I think this one concentrated on the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Still reading assigned material for my American history class at the University.
| Author | Descartes, Rene |
|---|---|
| Original Language | la |
| Translators | Lafleur, Laurence J. |
| Publication | The Library of the Liberal Arts, 1960 |
| Copyright Date | 1641 |
| Number of Pages | xviii + 85 |
| Extras | Notes on the Text |
| Extras | Editor's Introduction |
| Extras | Selected Bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Philosophy |
| When Read | December 1965 |
After the Discourse on Method many questions were raised and Descartes attempted to address them. There are six meditations in this attempt with the titles:
Concerning Things That Can Be Doubted.
Of the Nature of the Human Mind, and That It Is More Easily Known Than the Body.
Of God: That He Exists.
Of the True and the False.
Of the Essence of Material Things, and, Once More, of God: That He Exists.
Of the Existence of Corporeal Things and of the Real Distinctions Between the Mind and the Body [of Man].
The book went through multiple editions in multiple languages with multiple titles and was first published in Latin with the (translated) title: Meditations on First Philosophy, in which the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are demonstrated, and is most commonly known simply as Meditations.
I just found the copy of the Meditations among my books in the basement and was enabled to give the full bibliographic description above. The book had the yellow highlighting that I applied almost 55 years ago and the marginal notes that I occasionally added. I read a bit. There's no denying that Descartes was an extraordinarily intelligent man. I am no longer concerned with the problems that he was addressing. I take it for granted that the world is pretty much as our contemporary science describes it - a science that didn't exist in D's time. I don't think that questions about what is an idea and how we can know whether it's something real and objective, or something wholly subjective in our heads, don't interest me as much as they once did. It's not because I no longer care about philosophy, but because I have long since adopted a "pragmatic" or "instrumentalist" epistemology that sees that science has such powerful predictive value that we need no longer question whether it is based on sound notions of reality. What it describes really is real - a conclusion that D had to get to by more tortuous means.
Descartes tried to develop and further explicate his rationalist philosophy. I suspect that the emphasis on "Of God: That He Exists" was an effort to quiet down the conservatives and sectarians who would attack anyone who ignored, much less questioned, "revealed truth". It would not have satisfied the fanatics but it would have given some support to his position, his allies, and his defenders.
I will quote one paragraph, chosen almost randomly, as just an example of Descartes' extraordinary intellect. It's the opening paragraph of the Third Meditation, "Of God: That He Exists".
"Now I shall close my eyes, I shall stop my ears, I shall disregard my senses, I shall even efface from my mind all the images of corporeal things; or at least, since that can hardly be done, I shall consider them vain and false. By thus dealing only with myself and considering what is included in me, I shall try to make myself, little by little, better known and more familiar to myself."
Descartes was a great mathematician as well as a philosopher, the inventor of "Cartesian coordinates" and the founder of analytic geometry. Professor Kockelmans (the professor in my course on Rationalism) told us a wonderful story of some scientist/mathematicians who, wanting to meet the great man, came to visit him in Paris. Expecting to see astrolabes, dividers, protractors, and every known sort of geometrical tool, they asked if he would show them his instruments. He said that he would. He took a piece of paper from his desk, folded it, and said, "Here is my straight edge." That was all he said he needed. I believe that even Richard Feynman would have loved him.