Reading the Great Books of the Western World Order

1940 book by Mortimer J. Adler

How to Read a Book is a 1940 book by the philosopher Mortimer J. Adler. He co-authored a heavily revised edition in 1972 with the editor Charles Van Doren, which gives guidelines for critically reading proficient and keen books of any tradition. The 1972 revision, in addition to the first edition, treats genres (poetry, history, science, fiction, et cetera), inspectional and syntopical reading.

Overview of the 1972 edition [edit]

How to Read a Book is divided into 4 parts, each consisting of several chapters.

Part two: The Dimensions of Reading [edit]

Adler explains for whom the book is intended, defines different classes of reading, and tells which classes will be addressed. He besides makes a brief statement favoring the Groovy Books, and explains his reasons for writing How to Read a Volume.

There are three types of knowledge: practical, informational, and comprehensive. He discusses the methods of acquiring knowledge, final that practical knowledge, though teachable, cannot be truly mastered without experience; that only advisory noesis can be gained by one whose understanding equals the author'southward; that comprehension (insight) is all-time learned from who get-go achieved said understanding — an "original communication".

The idea that communication directly from those who starting time discovered an thought is the all-time way of gaining understanding is Adler'southward argument for reading the Neat Books; that any book that does not correspond original communication is junior, as a source, to the original, and that any teacher, save those who discovered the subject he or she teaches, is inferior to the Great Books as a source of comprehension.

Adler spends a good deal of this start department explaining why he was compelled to write this book. He asserts that very few people can read a volume for understanding, only that he believes that most are capable of it, given the right pedagogy and the volition to do then. It is his intent to provide that instruction. He takes time to tell the reader nigh how he believes that the educational system has failed to teach students the art of reading well, upwardly to and including undergraduate, academy-level institutions. He concludes that, due to these shortcomings in formal teaching, it falls upon individuals to cultivate these abilities in themselves. Throughout this section, he relates anecdotes and summaries of his feel in instruction as support for these assertions.

Role 1: The Third Level of Reading: Analytical Reading [edit]

Here, Adler sets along his method for reading a non-fiction book in social club to gain agreement. He claims that three distinct approaches, or readings, must all be fabricated in order to get the most possible out of a book, but that performing these iii levels of readings does not necessarily mean reading the volume iii times, as the experienced reader will be able to do all three in the course of reading the book just one time. Adler names the readings "structural", "interpretative", and "disquisitional", in that order.

Structural Stage: The start phase of belittling reading is concerned with understanding the structure and purpose of the volume. It begins with determining the basic topic and blazon of the book being read, then as to better conceptualize the contents and comprehend the book from the very offset. Adler says that the reader must distinguish between practical and theoretical books, as well equally determining the field of report that the volume addresses. Further, Adler says that the reader must notation whatever divisions in the volume, and that these are non restricted to the divisions laid out in the table of contents. Lastly, the reader must find out what problems the author is trying to solve.

Interpretive Stage: The 2d phase of belittling reading involves amalgam the author's arguments. This first requires the reader to note and sympathise any special phrases and terms that the writer uses. Once that is washed, Adler says that the reader should discover and work to sympathize each proffer that the author advances, also as the author'south support for those propositions.

Disquisitional Phase: In the third phase of analytical reading, Adler directs the reader to critique the book. He asserts that upon understanding the author's propositions and arguments, the reader has been elevated to the author's level of agreement and is at present able (and obligated) to judge the book's merit and accuracy. Adler advocates judging books based on the soundness of their arguments. Adler says that ane may not disagree with an argument unless one tin can notice error in its reasoning, facts, or premises, though ane is gratis to dislike information technology in any example.

The method presented is sometimes chosen the Structure-Proffer-Evaluation (SPE) method, though this term is not used in the book.

Function III: Approaches to Unlike Kinds of Reading Thing [edit]

In Function III, Adler briefly discusses the differences in approaching various kinds of literature and suggests reading several other books. He explains a method of approaching the Great Books – read the books that influenced a given author prior to reading works by that author – and gives several examples of that method.

Office Four: The Ultimate Goals of Reading [edit]

The last role of the book covers the fourth level of reading: syntopical reading. At this stage, the reader broadens and deepens his or her cognition on a given subject area—e.g., love, war, particle physics, etc.—by reading several books on that subject field. In the last pages of this part, the author expounds on the philosophical benefits of reading: "growth of the mind", fuller feel equally a conscious existence...

Reading list (1972 edition) [edit]

Appendix A in the 1972 edition provided the following recommended reading listing:

1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey
2. The Old Attestation
3. Aeschylus – Tragedies
4. Sophocles – Tragedies
5. Herodotus – Histories
6. Euripides – Tragedies
7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes – Comedies
10. Plato – Dialogues
11. Aristotle – Works
12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus
13. Euclid – Elements
14. Archimedes – Works
15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections
16. Cicero – Works
17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil – Works
19. Horace – Works
20. Livy – History of Rome
21. Ovid – Works
22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia
23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola; Germania
24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic
25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion
26. Ptolemy – Almagest
27. Lucian – Works
28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties
30. The New Testament
31. Plotinus – The Enneads
32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
33. The Vocal of Roland
34. The Nibelungenlied
35. The Saga of Burnt Njál
36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica
37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy
38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks
40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly
42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
43. Thomas More than – Utopia
44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Iii Treatises
45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel
46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Organized religion
47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays
48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote
50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
51. Francis Salary – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis
52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays
53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
54. Johannes Kepler – Paradigm of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Middle and Blood in Animals; On the Apportionment of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan
57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Soapbox on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on Start Philosophy
58. John Milton – Works
59. Molière – Comedies
60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises
61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Lite
62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics
63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Man Understanding; Thoughts Concerning Education
64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies
65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics
66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding; Monadology
67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe
68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Periodical to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Small-scale Proposal
69. William Congreve – The Style of the Earth
70. George Berkeley – Principles of Homo Noesis
71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man
72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws
73. Voltaire – Messages on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets
76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Inquiry Concerning Man Understanding
77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract
78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through French republic and Italy
79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
82. James Boswell – Periodical; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.
83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers
85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poesy and Truth
87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Oestrus
88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Correct; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
89. William Wordsworth – Poems
90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria
91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma
92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War
93. Stendhal – The Ruby-red and the Blackness; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
94. Lord Byron – Don Juan
95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism
96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology
98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy
99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet
100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal
101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter of the alphabet
102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America
103. John Stuart Factory – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times
106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Written report of Experimental Medicine
107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden
108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto
109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch
110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Offense and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories
113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays
114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Fine art?; 20-3 Tales
115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger
116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism
117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors
118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power
119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method
120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Culture and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces
122. Max Planck – Origin and Development of the Breakthrough Theory; Where Is Scientific discipline Going?; Scientific Autobiography
123. Henri Bergson – Fourth dimension and Free Volition; Affair and Retention; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Faith
124. John Dewey – How Nosotros Call back; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic: the Theory of Research
125. Alfred North Whitehead – An Introduction to Mathematics; Scientific discipline and the Modernistic Earth; The Aims of Instruction and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
126. George Santayana – The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places
127. Vladimir Lenin – The Land and Revolution
128. Marcel Proust – Remembrance of Things By
129. Bertrand Russell – The Problems of Philosophy; The Analysis of Mind; An Enquiry into Meaning and Truth; Man Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits
130. Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
131. Albert Einstein – The Significant of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
132. James Joyce – 'The Dead' in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Swain; Ulysses
133. Jacques Maritain – Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; The Rights of Human and Natural Law; Truthful Humanism
134. Franz Kafka – The Trial; The Castle
135. Arnold J. Toynbee – A Study of History; Civilisation on Trial
136. Jean-Paul Sartre – Nausea; No Go out; Being and Nothingness
137. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – The First Circle; The Cancer Ward

Publication data [edit]

• Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Volume: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education, (1940) OCLC 822771595
  • 1967 edition published with subtitle A Guide to Reading the Great Books ISBN 978-0-671-21209-4 OCLC 500166716
  • 1972 revised edition, coauthor Charles Van Doren, New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN ane-567-31010-9 OCLC 788925161

Run into also [edit]

• How to Read Literature Like a Professor
• Reading (process)

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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book

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