Martin Seymour Smith
Posted on 07/27/2004 12:17:17 PM PDT by Borges
The I Ching. c. 1500 B.C.. The Old Testament. c. 1500 B.C.. Homer The Iliad. The Odyssey. 9th century B.C.. The Upanishads. c. 700-400 B.CE. Lao-Tzu The Way and Its Power. 3rd century B.C.. The Avesta. c. 500 B.C.. Confucius Analects. c. 5th-4th century B.C.. Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War. 5th century B.CE. Hippocrates Works. c. 400 B.C.. Aristotle Works. 4th century B.C. Herodotus History. 4th century B.C.. Plato The Republic. c. 380 B.C.. Euclid Elements. c. 280 B.C.. The Dhammapada. c. 252 B.C.. Virgil The Aeneid. 70-19 B.C.. Lucretius On the Nature of Reality. c. 55 B.C.. Philo of Alexandria Allegorical Expositions of the Holy Laws. 1st century The New Testament. c. 64-110 . Plutarch Lives. c. 50-120 . Cornelius Tacitus Annals, From the Death of the Divine Augustus. c.120 The Gospel of Truth (The Valentinian Speculation). c.1st century Marcus Aurelius Meditations. 167 C.E. Sextus Empiricus Outlines of Pyrrhonism. c. 150-210 Plotinus Enneads. 3d century Augustine of Hippo Confessions. c. 400. The Koran. 7th century . Moses Maimonides Guide for the Perplexed. 1190 The Kabbalah (Quabala). 12th century . Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae. 1266-1273 Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy. 1321 Desiderius Erasmus In Praise of Folly. 1509 Niccolo Machiavelli he Prince. 1532 Martin Luther On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. 1520 Francois Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel. 1534, 1532. John Calvin Institutes of the Christian Religion. 1536 Nicolaus Copernicus On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs. 1543 Michel Eyquem de Montaigne Essays. 1580 Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote. Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615 Johannes Kepler The Harmony of the World. 1619 Francis Bacon Novum Organum. 1620 William Shakespeare The First Folio. 1623 Galileo Galilei Dialogue Concerning Two New Chief World Systems. 1632 Rene Desartes Discourse on Method. 1637 Thomas Hobbes Leviathan. 1651 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz Works. 1663-1716 Blaise Pascal Pensees. 1670 Baruch de Spinoza. Ethics. 1677 John Bunyan Pilgrim's Progress. 1678-1684 Isaac Newton Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. 1687 John Locke Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 1689 George Berkeley The Principles of Human Knowledge. 1740, rev 1734 Giambattista Vico The New Science. 1725, rev 1730, 1744 David Hume A Treatise of Human Nature. 1739-1740 Denis Diderot, ed. The Encyclopedia. 1751-1772 Samuel Johnson A Dictionary of the English Language. 1755 Francois-Marie de Voltaire Candide. 1759 Thomas Paine Common Sense. 1776 Adam Smith An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776 Edward Gibbon The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 1776-87 Immanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason. 1781 rev 1787 Jean-Jacques Rousseau Confessions. 1781 Edmund Burke Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790 Mary Wollstonecraft Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792 William Godwin An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. 1793 Thomas Robert Malthus An Essay on the Principle of Population. 1798 rev 1803 George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit. 1807 Arnold Schopenhauer The World as Will and Idea. 1819 Auguste Comte Course in the Positivist Philosophy. 1830-1842 Carl Marie von Clausewitz On War. 1832 Soren Kierkegaard Either/Or. 1843 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels The Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848 Henry David Thoreau Civil Disobedience. 1849 Charles Darwin The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. 1859 John Stuart Mill On Liberty. 1859 Herbert Spencer First Principles. 1862 Gregor Mendel "Experiments With Plant Hybrids." 1866 Leo Tolstoy War and Peace. 1868-1869 James Clerk Maxwell Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. 1873 Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spake Zarathustra. 1883-1885 Sigmund Freud The Interpretation of Dreams. 1900 William James Pragmatism. 1908 Albert Einstein Relativity. 1916 Vilfredo Pareto The Mind and Society. 1916 Carl Gustav Jung Psychological Types. 1921 Martin Buber I and Thou. 1923 Franz Kafka The Trial. 1925 Karl Popper The Logic of Scientific Discovery. 1934 John Maynard Keynes The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. 1936 Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness. 1943 Friedrich von Hayek The Road to Serfdom. 1944 Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex. 1948 Norbert Wiener Cybernetics. 1948, rev 1961 George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949 George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. 1950 Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations. 1953 Noam Chomsky Syntactic Structures. 1957 Thomas Samuel Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 1962 rev 1970 Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique. 1963 Mao Zedong Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung. 1966 B. F. Skinner Beyond Freedom and Dignity. 1971
Candide! What a worthless piece of trash! This casts suspicion on the whole list!
You don't think Voltaire had an influence on the American and French revolutions? and therefore on every other revolution. I would submit that many of the founding fathers read and liked Candide.
I read it many years ago.
The material which sticks in my mind is the racist material in the book.
Chomsky's hate America poitics are disgraceful and dangerous, but his linguistic efforts, particularly his attempt to create a true grammar and syntax for English that would replace the hodgepodge of Germanic and Latin grammatical paradigms was a brilliant effort
Can anyone tell me why "The Gospel of Truth" (an obscure gnostic text), "Gargantua and Pantagruel," "Candide," and "Don Quixote" are on this list?
Puzzled about Machiavelli. The book was simply an amoral accounting of political strategems that had been utilized for centuries. C.S. Lewis thought little of it because it had no new thought, nor did it build on the body of thought extant at the time to provide new understanding.
I've read it, but wouldn't think it amongst the giants of literary activity, by any means.
Rasdigilft also had wonderful stories.
So did Kidveglulm.
See, I can make up names too.
I think you're overstating it.
The main reason for the observed phenomenon is that recent works of far lesser quality is being included due to the bias of familiarity.
Think about it, we are talking about approximately 100 books over the the course of over 3000 years of human civilization, which means for any given century you would expect 3-4 works that will make the list. Except you look at this list and get 20 books in the 20th century alone. THe average quality of these works are hence nowhere near the quality of the earlier selections. Which gives the appearance that works of the 20th century are of lesser quality than the works of earlier times. No so, it's just that the nonsense of ages past, unable to withstand the test of time, are largely forgotten with time, as will all the mediocrities on this list from the 20th century.
Absolutely! Excellent contribution.
A. Invalid
B. Compiled by an ignoramous.
I'd replace Bacon's Novum Organon with either his Advancement of Learning or the Essays. The essays are the steely counterbalance to Montaigne's -- and between them they created most modern non-fiction writing. The Advancement of Learning merely ended the Middle Ages and kicked off the modern world.
Thank you for fixin' the list.
The criteria is influence. Are you suggesting the Koran hasn't had any?
Oh Man!
"Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel" was one of my all time favorites as a kid. I loved that book.
And I cherish the memories of reading "The Poky Little Puppy" to my daughter when she was very little.
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