C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books • Hacker News Board

Re: C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books

#71

Post by bhritchie » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 10:59 PM UTC

jxcl wrote: post #4

I can entirely relate to what Lewis writes about reading Plato. I was interested in philosophy but found myself gravitating to reading and listening to podcasts about philosophy rather than reading it directly. Once I actually picked up a volume of Plato's works I was surprised how approachable it was to me, a complete layman of philosophy.

Plato is certainly very approachable, and perhaps Athanasius is as well; of course there are examples on the other side as well - Aristotle leaps to mind. Better, probably, to read an account of his logic than to try to read the Prior Analytics, for instance.

Re: C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books

#72

Post by Koshkin » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 11:02 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #51

enriquto wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some old articles in physics are surprisingly concise. There is no point in reading a modern 300 page book on special relativity when you can just read "on the electrodynamics of moving bodies" which is 23 pages and self-contained.

I can't speak for the specific book you're talking about, but there are definitely a lot to say about relativity that has been discovered since the time of Eisenstein.

Not a lot, actually. Einstein (and a few other people before him) did pretty much all there was to it.

Re: C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books

#73

Post by spenczar5 » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 11:06 PM UTC

FiatLuxDave wrote: post #18

I rather enjoyed this essay, not because I am into theology, but because I also see the value of old books. I think that I am a bit of a heretic (if I can use that word in a theology thread) because I strongly believe that there is advantage to be gained by reading old books of... science! It is often presumed that because we learn new things as time goes on, and old theories are discarded as new information comes to…

I like doing this too, but man, it can be really hard to follow old math and physics literature. Newton’s explanation of the laws of motion, which doesn’t use anything resembling modern notation or terminology, was extremely difficult for me to follow. You won’t find any “F=ma” in there.

Maxwell’s laws of electricity and magnetism are even harder. Today, “Maxwell’s Laws” refers to four equations, each quite brief. In his original paper, though, they are a system of 20 simultaneous equations with 20 variables with a dizzying amount of bookkeeping to keep track of x- y- and z- dimensions, because the curl and divergence operators hadn’t really been invented yet.

Re: C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books

#74

Post by pmoriarty » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 11:07 PM UTC

genghisjahn wrote: post #56

amasad wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for me with Stoicism: I read everything modern book on it and while it was useful nothing comes close to when I actually decided to pick up the classics, starting with Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

Read Epictetus if you liked MAs Mediations.

Read Seneca if you liked Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. He's better than both, imo.

Re: C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books

#75

Post by el_cid » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 11:08 PM UTC

Great article! CS Lewis always surprises me with his... "wise common sense". I'm constantly let down my modern books, some of them highly acclaimed. But the great filter explains it all perfectly. I'm going to take this into consideration when selecting my books from now on.

Re: C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books

#76

Post by pmoriarty » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 11:08 PM UTC

perfect_wave wrote: post #25

jxcl wrote: post #4

I can entirely relate to what Lewis writes about reading Plato. I was interested in philosophy but found myself gravitating to reading and listening to podcasts about philosophy rather than reading it directly. Once I actually picked up a volume of Plato's works I was surprised how approachable it was to me, a complete layman of philosophy.

Got any recommendations for philosophy podcasts?

Partially Examined Life

It's hosted by former philosophy students who cover many dozens of philosphers relatively in depth. Their style is very approachable and conversational. They're not stuffy or boring, and often they're pretty funny. I've listened to a lot of philosophy podcasts and this is by far the best.

https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/

Re: C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books

#77

Post by slededit » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 11:13 PM UTC

enriquto wrote: post #70

slededit wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with the premise that everything is bytes - Harvard architecture computers more cleanly separate nouns (the data) from verbs (the instructions). There is no fundamental requirement the two be mixed although it is done for convenience. With fixed function hardware there is no binary code to execute at all. Objects - which make verbs first class citizens more cleanly represent the true state of affairs and c…

> Objects - which make verbs first class citizens (...) There's much to be said for and against "objects" from philosophical, scientific, technological and engineering standpoints. Personally, I agree with the great men that think that object orientation is bullshit (torvalds, stepanov, pike, ...). Still, whatever you think about the appropriateness of objects, they do not make verbs first class citizens, but nouns !

Its been a while since I've gotten into the theory here. But ultimately an object is a set of data and mutators upon that data.

The Unix model does not link the two together - where for most hardware the two are inseparable. A sound card can only work on certain formats of data - it is more than mere bytes. It may have only limited processing ability (e.g. an EQ functionality or FM synthesizer). Ioctls are a hack around this - and of course they do "work" but they are not clean. They are also clearly not congruent with the Unix philosophy, you can't cleanly chain and pipe them or compose them into a larger whole.

NT did much better on this front, but much of the beauty is hidden by the horrid win32 layered on top. Cocoa is much nicer and probably the best real world example of how nice it can be when done right. You can use the UNIX APIs on a mac, but why would you want to?

Re: C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books

#78

Post by brennebeck » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 11:16 PM UTC

gopalv wrote: post #62

noonespecial wrote: post #19

Time is a fantastic filter. When I was cleaning out my grandparents attic I found a few dozen old books from the 30s and 40s. Wanting to see if they had any value I searched Amazon Ebay and even Google. I could find no record of them having ever even existed. I opened a few of them and found out why. They sucked.

> I opened a few of them and found out why. They sucked. It could be worse - they could be fascinating, but entirely irrelevant to the modern world view. My dad had a cache of books from a friend of his - that was collected from the pre-independence era for India from 1920s to 1945. The world in those books were strange - the era looks like nothing like the world from my text books. The "Great war" had just passed ("…

Do you happen to remember some of the titles?

Re: C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books

#79

Post by Koshkin » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 11:16 PM UTC

inimino wrote: post #17

coldtea wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technological books do not age as well, because technical knowledge is predominantly cumulative. It's for fields where thoughts are evergreen (basically, anything to do with being human, literature, poetry, philosophy, etc) where this advice matters. A good modern book on math, or chemistry, or compiler construction has more knowledge than any old one. A good modern poet is not better than Shakespeare or Homer (and i…

The best geometry textbook hasn't changed for more than 2000 years. Mathematics textbooks are just as likely as anything else to suffer from modern pedagogical theories that have not been tested by time and will come to be regarded as mistakes.

The textbook has not changed, geometry did. The modern notion of geometry encompasses so much more that it is hard to describe in a few words.

Re: C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books

#80

Post by rexpop » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 11:20 PM UTC

gopalv wrote: post #62

noonespecial wrote: post #19

Time is a fantastic filter. When I was cleaning out my grandparents attic I found a few dozen old books from the 30s and 40s. Wanting to see if they had any value I searched Amazon Ebay and even Google. I could find no record of them having ever even existed. I opened a few of them and found out why. They sucked.

> I opened a few of them and found out why. They sucked. It could be worse - they could be fascinating, but entirely irrelevant to the modern world view. My dad had a cache of books from a friend of his - that was collected from the pre-independence era for India from 1920s to 1945. The world in those books were strange - the era looks like nothing like the world from my text books. The "Great war" had just passed ("…

I don't see how they could be obsoleted. What we know of Rome is very often through late-Roman scholars. We'll need these texts to disprove modern anti-historians, who make claims about our origins to drive reactionary politics.

A Roman example--as described in Mary Beard's "SPQR"--is how imperialists claimed Rome was always ruled by kings, attempting to erase its Republican history. Contemporary populations accepted that viewpoint because they didn't have access to history.

They're still relevant.

Frankly, I am grateful for even your cursory summaries.