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Essential Works of Non-Fiction? - Page 2

post #16 of 19
12/1/08 at 7:15pm
another vital work to read completely is the feynman lectures on physics.
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post #17 of 19
12/1/08 at 7:15pm
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Originally Posted by holymadness View Post
Edward Said should never be read [. . .] and Judith Butler should never be considered
These are great and timeless truths.
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Originally Posted by holymadness View Post
Not that I dislike autodidacticism; I happen to think that in many ways it's much more useful than a structured liberal arts education. But it tends towards a lack of thoroughness and superficiality by being so flexible, and reading seminal works alone is surely not enough to produce a learned person. OP definitely needs to take one thing at a time, choose a specific area to focus on to begin with, and build up a good repertoire of texts dealing with that topic before moving on to the next one.
You raise some good objections, but as you say, autodidacticism also has much to recommend it. I'm less concerned than you about reading great works of the past without an entire contextualizing apparatus at hand. Often the critical editions available of these works provide at least a basic overview of the events surrounding their inception; and I think many of them, even those which some later scholars have tried to dismiss, contain ideas and images which can fruitfully be brought to bear on our lives and the questions of our day. Great ideas are not merely for an age, but for all time.
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post #18 of 19
12/1/08 at 10:48pm
Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism.
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post #19 of 19
12/1/08 at 10:52pm
I think you should read some von Krafft-Ebbing.
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