PG's Rarely Asked Questions

I've meant to compile this list, so you just inspired me. I wish the Durants had had the stamina for one more volume. I don't know much about the European revolutions of 1848 and would have like to read about that time from them. I already had read a lot of ancient Greek literature in translation as well as The Pentateuch, all the historical books of the Old Testament and the Gospels. Western Civilization springs from intellectual roots in Athens and Jerusalem, so any survey has to include that heritage. My degree is in Comparative Literature, so I put a lot of stock in origninal source material. The only languages I read are English and German, so everything is in English or translation except Faust, which IMO would be a waste in translation. The books I read for my survey (this was my survey to fill in my personal Bildungslöcke) are not all classics, and not even all to be recommended. It may appear surprisingly heavy on 20th century, but a lot of intellectual threads I thought I should understand better got kicked off in that century. In more or less chronological order by authorship or content (and I've probably forgotten a few):

Euclid The Elements

Arrian The Campaigns of Alexander

Garmonsway (trans.) The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Komroff (ed.) The Travels of Marco Polo

Haydn The Counter-Renaissance

Braudel The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, Vol I&II

Pascal The Thoughts

Spinoza The Ethics

Christianson In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton & his Times

Newton Opticks

Newton Principia (get the modern English translation by U.C. Press)

Hampson The Enlightenment

Voltaire Candide

Rousseau The Social Contract

Boswell Life of Johnson

Goethe Faust

Phillips The Cousins' Wars

Schom Napoleon Bonaparte

Heidler & Heidler Old Hickory's War

Babbage On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures

de Toqueville Democracy in America

Darwin On the Origen of Species

Foote The Civil War: A Narrative

Maurois Disraeli

Twain Life on the Mississippi

Spector Admiral of the New Empire, The Life and Career of George Dewey

Cardwell The Norton History of Technology

Abbott Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions

Meyer & Brysac Tournament of Shaddows, The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia

Doughty Travels in Arabia Deserta

Lefevre The Golden Flood

Massie Dreadnought, Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War

Lawrence Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Durant The Story of Philosophy

Cardozo The Nature of the Judicial Process

Schapiro The Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Popper The Logic of Scientific Discovery

Kershaw Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

Blemenson (ed.) The Patton Papers (1940-1945)

Hayek The Road to Serfdom

von Mises Human Action

Skinner Walden Two

Chambers Witness

Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Guevara Guerrilla Warfare

Cleaver Soul on Ice

Lacey The Kingdom, Arabia & the House of Saud

Durant The Lessons of History

Hackworth Lessons Learned, Vietnam Primer

Quigley Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time

EDIT: Just remembered two more

Hobbes Leviathan

Locke Two Treatises of Government

I was contacted by St.John's as a high school senior, and thought their program looked really interesting, but my folks couldn't afford a private college for me. In those days a California resident could go to U.C. and it just cost living expenses and books.

You're making things unnecessarily difficult for yourself, and I don't know if it's because you're ignorant of other options, because you lack the ability to figure out better solutions to your problems, or because you have an irrational compulsion for unproductive busywork. I've never heard of anyone actually documenting every click it takes to configure Outlook. I don't even know what you're talking about when you say you "index" and "abstract" API docs--I just keep them open in a browser window and search for things I don't remember offhand. Maybe all this busywork is a coping strategy for being out of your depth, but it still isn't productive.

Here's how I solved the backup problem: I bought an external hard drive, connected it to my Mac, and clicked "yes" when my Mac asked if I wanted to use it for backups. Here's how I solved my email problem: I set up Google Apps on my domain, which took a total of maybe 30 minutes (though I'm sure you'd go through and document every single click it took to configure the DNS settings). Here's how I got my first editor: I got TextMate and started using it, and was productive from the first second. As far as scripting languages for building code, I think I learned how to use make and that's about it. That's all I needed to do to be productive. I can, and in many cases have, wasted time wanking over configuring everything in finer detail, but that's not a useful mentality.

It's probably not even about Microsoft at this point. There are lots of programmers who are productive on Microsoft (though I've never met a serious programmer who actually uses Visual Basic). You just don't seem to be one of them if it's as much of an ordeal for you as you make it out to be.

I don't think you got much deeper in the long form.

From what I recall, these critiques of philosophy are well-known in philosophy, especially reactions to Aristotle. A inexperienced reader would get the impression that Aristotle and the mistakes he engendered went unchecked for a couple thousand years, until brought to bay by the sterling efforts of Bertrand Russell and Paul Graham.

From someone proposing a new approach to philosophy (!):

1. I would expect to see a little more on some of the less peculiar empiricists - Berkeley, in my dim memories, was the most obscure of that little grouping.

2. A less Cliff's Notes discussion of what's happened in analytic philosophy that strays beyond the brand names (Russell, Wittgenstein) wouldn't go astray either. Claiming it's all about 'language games' is a sophomoric 'out' to having to engage with any of the rest of analytic philosophy.

It's interesting how a concise conclusion you disagree with is evidence of ignorance. I don't know how much you know about philosophy, but from what I picked up during my bachelor's, it turned out to be interesting but all in all not too important. The central problem is still there: anything that's rigorous enough that it might be true is narrowly scoped and doesn't come to a wide enough conclusion to be interesting, and anything that's especially vast in terms of implications is usually vague bullshit.