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
Skinner has long been a pariah in academia-largely due to Chomsky's intense agenda against him, and Chomsky, of course, still has a sizable contigent of mindless followers. Kuhn also continues to be mandatory reading in philosophy and rhetoric departments.
First of all, the criteria is influential, not quality per se. Granted, higher quality of work tends to be more influential, but the correlation is not absolute.
As much you might find the contents of the Koran distateful, you cannot deny it's long lasting effect on human history.
The 20th century is not without its great thinkers, I'll put Einstein's work on relativity, Frederich Hayek's A Road to Serfdom, up there against the works of great thinkers from any other era.
Candide....the worst book I have ever read.
What? No Harret Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin? What about Mein Kamp? By Mr. A. Hitler.
Man's Place in Nature, T.H. Huxley
Principia Mathematica, Russell and Whitehead
The Great Terror and Harvest of Sorrow, Robert Conquest
The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk
What is Life?Erwin Schrodinger
Sociobiology E.O. Wilson
No Gone With the Wind???
I'm still working on mein kampf. He babbles on endlessly. Another missing is Sun Tzu; The art of war. It is still taught at U.S. military learning centers.
Thank you for your efforts, both of you. I appreciate the use of FR, and the internet in this manner.
re:In his entry on Clausewitz he suggests that this update on Sun Tzu's work has had the greater influence.
In my humble opinion Clausewitz provides focus but not amplification to the _Art of War_. Sun Tsu's poetic work is more about managing conflict than war and its focus more on preparing for and avoiding war than on conducting it.
It is this poetic and generalized approach that makes _Art of War_ such a seminal work. As I previously mentioned, my dear wife regards _AOW_ as the definitive book on selling real estate because it teaches how to manage conflict on a personal level. There are lessons here for everyday life, not just the battlefields of warring nations. In this, Sun Tsu transcends Clauswitz.
regards,
In it, Locke questions cause and effect.
Missing, but worthy of the list:
"Alcoholics Anonymous." 1939
approaching 20 million copies (or maybe more). lotsa languages.
"Atlas Shrugged"
Ted Turner has the rights to it. That's one movie that will never be made. It would be too dangerous for today's Democratic/Socialist party. They have managed doing a great deal of damage to our system from within the educational system.
Upton Sinlair's "The Jungle" would be another infulential title.
1st rule in Dem Club -- Do ANYTHING to get elected
2nd rule in Dem Club -- Don't get caught doin' rule 1
tru peace...D
That's a complete myth.
The cat goes postal every time it sees one of those idiotic lists and the lame arguments that come with it regarding the order of importance and the membership, but fortunately it's (the cat is) away from its firearms. Is compiling lists a strictly American disease?
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