Book Store Directory at Therapist-Psychologist.com - Great Books of the Western World (60 Volumes)

Enter Keywords:

Index : Product Listings : Product Details

Back

View Larger

Great Books of the Western World (60 Volumes)

( Encyclopedia Britannica, Incorporated )

Release Date: 1994-03
Average Customer Rating:

List Price: $995.00
Price: $995.00
Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25.
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

Add to Cart

Book Description
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.

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 Moli�re, 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

Volume 40 J. S. Mill

Volume 41 Boswell

Volume 44 Tocqueville

Volume 50 Marx, Engels

Volume 57 Veblen, Tawney, Keyne

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
How to Think About the Great Ideas: From the Great Books of Western Civilization	How to Read a Book (A Touchstone Book)	How to Speak How to Listen	Ten Philosophical Mistakes	Adler's Philosophical Dictionary: 125 Key Terms for the Philosopher's Lexicon

Product Reviews:

Great Books of the Western World
The Great Books played a significant role in my early education process and I have always placed considerable value in what they represent. Over the many years I managed to get separated from my original set. I've recently replaced them and was quickly reminded of their importance. I'm truly looking forward to re-familiarizing myself with them during this stage of my life.

Henry W. Kappel

Absolutely the Best of Human Civilization
When I was 16, my father bought me a set of the Great Books. They changed my life. Tocqueville, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, et al.

They teach compassion, reason, understanding, social responsibility, and every other conceivable virtue.

The best of the best all in one volume
These books are worth their weight in Gold. You can find most, if not all, of these writings for free on the internet since there is no copyright anymore; however, if you are looking for physical books then this is the way to go. Very well made and if you go to the Britannica website you may a good deal or at least a payment plan for the hefty price.

Poorly Organized
I had heard of the Great Books Project some time ago but had never actually had a chance to see these translations until this past semester at my school library. They were located on the top floor right next to the bathroom so I sort stumbled into them by accident one night. After sifting through a few of these I can't say that I was anything other than supremely disapointed. It was a noble attempt on Adler's part but it just didn't pan out for a number of reasons.

I'm not one of these diversity crackpots and I personally think schools that use this collection (albeit losely) as a foundation for their curriculum (St. John's in Annapolis particularly) are vastly more rigorous, comprehensive, and rewarding than those of practically every other American University. Four years of science, three of mathematics, three of intensive Greek and French, weekly seminars in Western Literature and Philosophy. It's no wonder that this environment produces among the highest acceptance rates into top professional and graduate programs in the country.

However, as I mentioned before these schools use Adler's collection as more of a suggestion than anything else mostly because this hodgepodge of some 37,000 poorly translated and at times even obsolete pages of loseleaf paper couldn't possibly offer the coherence required of a college program.

To be fair though this was not Adler's intention with this collection. Still, one is left wondering what exactly Adler's intention was with all of this. One would assume that the intention was to get these books into as many homes and minds as possible. That's a great idea in principle but if folks aren't interest in reading these books individually what would lead you to believe that assembling them in one giant mass makes them more intriguing? Certainly he couldn't have done this to make the books more affordable ($1000+)...oh dear God, I believe he did.

I found the translations to be cumbersome, utterly oblivious to the language of the author's time and location, and unnecessarily small in size. Oh and the paper is of extremely low quality as well at least in the series I read out of.

These are all problems but what I find most unfortunate is the lack of coherence to the whole thing. First off, WHERE are the history books? Aside from the two big Greeks there are absolutely none to be found in the entire collection. Tens of thousands of pages with no history whatsoever to put any of into context for the young reader who I'll assume is the target audience of this collection.

Secondly, I support the attempt to expose the general public to the beauty of mathematics and especially science. But seriously, is there any point in adding something like Newton's Principia to this collection other than to show off? Really, what percentage of the population can make sense of a book like that? Cambridge prints short introductory texts to dozens of subjects in the sciences that are more relavent to that 99.99% of the population that doesn't have an advanced degree in Physics of Mathematics. Next.

Third, if you're selecting works based on influence then how do people like Kierkegaard, Marx and Nietzsche only get one of work apeice included whereas folks like Chaucer, Pascal and Ibsen get numerous selections? How can it be that Pascal has had more influence than a man whose philosophy spawned worldwide panic, violence and revolution for most of the 20th Century?

Finally, if you're going to try and produce a comprehensive collection of the Greatest the Western World has produced why not select each authors most notable contributions to that legacy. Nobody remembers Thomas Mann for "Death and Venice." Nobody remembers Joyce for "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."

But then again I could be wrong. Regardless, I am still going to give this book 4 stars for fighting the good fight against relativism, multiculturalism and the general degeneration of the human race.

Great contents, but ( sentosa91 )
Bid a new set from ebay and it arrived in two boxes. It has great contents, but:

1) The books are small in dimension, so print is small and not easy to read.

2) The paper is thin.

3) Need more pictures.

4) Some volumes are quite thin. It will be better either adding more contents, or combine volumes to make the whole set more manageable.

5) The set is listed at $1,195, which translates to about $20 per volume. Judging from the quality of the book, printing quality should be no more than $5 per volume. They should reduce price to make it more accessible.

THE THERAPIST PSYCHOLOGIST BOOK STORE