As you are already inclined to read texts you expect to broaden your mental scope, I would recommend to move to real literature, e.g. a few novels by Dostoyevsky. Or this excellent and beautifull to read history of civilization. This, a study-in-a-novel used like a textbook in french history seminars, on the mindsets and times when modern science was born, may be a bit complex, but recommendable. Russel’s History of Western Philosophy is a very good and usefull book too. Among the smaller texts, I found some of Putnam’s Essays good here. Plato’s dialogues are directly focussed on your question, as they are much more about igniting a process of thinking in the reader, than specific contents or statements they discuss. I would suggest his “Parmenides”. But perhaps Descartes is more accessible for you. As you mention sci-tech interests, here finally a very good book relating to that.
I strongly disagree with those recommendations. Those are all old books. Old books are more prestigious, but they’re significantly less educational and more confusing than new books on the same topics would be. Reading old books forces you to deal with the errors and confusions that later writers corrected, plus a culture gap and in some cases also a language gap.
Hmm… do you mean that for all the books mentioned, or do you make an exception for fiction like Dostoevsky & Plato? It seems to me that there aren’t really good fiction textbooks to bring you up to speed quickly, the way there are in technical disciplines.
With a few exceptions, I think of fiction as being meant to entertain, not to educate, so there is no impartial criteria like “accuracy” to apply. How entertaining a class of books is depends heavily on the reader, so I don’t expect my preferences to generalize.
No, that is wrong. E.g. Proust, Flaubert, Balzac, the Mann’s, etc. had a very strong focus on the cognitive content of their writings. Weil, Grothendieck, B. Mazur, Y. Manin and many other science writers (I am pretty sure that it fits to Dirac too, but lack precise infos) spend much thoughts on literature, language and poetics. The idea you express fit only to low level texts of both sorts (lit/sci). But the question was about good texts which help to improve the reader’s mind.
I would suggest that fiction does have some epistemic value too. The best novels/poems/etc. help you understand your own motivation and more easily put you in the shoes of others. Again, I’m only talking about the very best stuff, but for example Austen and especially late Frost have help me become noticeably wiser about interpersonal matters, and I’d estimate that it saved me about 10 years’ worth of lived experience and mistakes. Maybe more, since I’m not an especially sociable person by inclination.
Of course, even if we agreed on this, that wouldn’t establish whether you feel you need more of that sort of wisdom, and whether you have the prereqs to benefit from it,.
“novels/poems/etc. help you understand your own motivation and more easily put you in the shoes of others” That is only a very late and somewhat restricted idea. E.g. ancient greek science of history used novels etc. as epistomological tool, because the core of the things, that what really happened shows not in the surface of the facts, but has to be found and by poetic/artistic work (re)constructed. That was the reason, why their statues were colored like pop art, and why Thukydides’ history book contains poetic inventions as quotes . It is a bit as if in a documentary on e.g. the cold war, suddenly Thatcher, Reagan and Gorbatchev would sing an opera. In contemporary american literature you have this e.g. in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried . Or in Reed’s “Naming of Parts.”. A friend (a great mathematician AND great intellectual ) allowed to illustrate that point by the poem there, scroll down.
Dear jimr..., your confusion could be cured by “reading” and “thinking”. Books and other texts should be taken with respect of their content, nor their age, cover design, typeset, or other features. However, if you want a more recent one, I’d recommend this, as a kind of emergency aid in cases of acute confusion.
My recommendations are entirely caused by the quality of the texts and by their fitting to the question above. That some were written between the beginning and the middle of the 20th century is not quite an accident: That was the time of the science and university revolution in the US: The huge and sudden growth of science education then caused a strong demand on easy to read, unpretentious, well written and high quality introductory texts for the many students from rural, underdeveloped regions and equally undereducated kids from (then, when few and simple machines were in use) unskilled industrial workers.
Dear jimr..., your confusion could be cured by “reading” and “thinking”.
This comes across as extremely condescending. I didn’t say that I was confused, I said that old books in general tend to be confused. Particularly in philosophy, where clarity, accuracy and academic prestige don’t seem to be well aligned.
Did I write that you said that you are confused? The books I recommended were written for the general readership, and I do not see how your remarks should apply to them. Which books would you recommend?
For Plato, I would discourage most people from beginning with the Parmenides. It’s something of a difficult work, and a lot of people will find it much easier to begin with one of the dialogues that’s about something in particular—best if it’s a topic they already are curious about.
As you are already inclined to read texts you expect to broaden your mental scope, I would recommend to move to real literature, e.g. a few novels by Dostoyevsky. Or this excellent and beautifull to read history of civilization. This, a study-in-a-novel used like a textbook in french history seminars, on the mindsets and times when modern science was born, may be a bit complex, but recommendable. Russel’s History of Western Philosophy is a very good and usefull book too. Among the smaller texts, I found some of Putnam’s Essays good here. Plato’s dialogues are directly focussed on your question, as they are much more about igniting a process of thinking in the reader, than specific contents or statements they discuss. I would suggest his “Parmenides”. But perhaps Descartes is more accessible for you. As you mention sci-tech interests, here finally a very good book relating to that.
I strongly disagree with those recommendations. Those are all old books. Old books are more prestigious, but they’re significantly less educational and more confusing than new books on the same topics would be. Reading old books forces you to deal with the errors and confusions that later writers corrected, plus a culture gap and in some cases also a language gap.
Hmm… do you mean that for all the books mentioned, or do you make an exception for fiction like Dostoevsky & Plato? It seems to me that there aren’t really good fiction textbooks to bring you up to speed quickly, the way there are in technical disciplines.
With a few exceptions, I think of fiction as being meant to entertain, not to educate, so there is no impartial criteria like “accuracy” to apply. How entertaining a class of books is depends heavily on the reader, so I don’t expect my preferences to generalize.
No, that is wrong. E.g. Proust, Flaubert, Balzac, the Mann’s, etc. had a very strong focus on the cognitive content of their writings. Weil, Grothendieck, B. Mazur, Y. Manin and many other science writers (I am pretty sure that it fits to Dirac too, but lack precise infos) spend much thoughts on literature, language and poetics. The idea you express fit only to low level texts of both sorts (lit/sci). But the question was about good texts which help to improve the reader’s mind.
I would suggest that fiction does have some epistemic value too. The best novels/poems/etc. help you understand your own motivation and more easily put you in the shoes of others. Again, I’m only talking about the very best stuff, but for example Austen and especially late Frost have help me become noticeably wiser about interpersonal matters, and I’d estimate that it saved me about 10 years’ worth of lived experience and mistakes. Maybe more, since I’m not an especially sociable person by inclination.
Of course, even if we agreed on this, that wouldn’t establish whether you feel you need more of that sort of wisdom, and whether you have the prereqs to benefit from it,.
“novels/poems/etc. help you understand your own motivation and more easily put you in the shoes of others” That is only a very late and somewhat restricted idea. E.g. ancient greek science of history used novels etc. as epistomological tool, because the core of the things, that what really happened shows not in the surface of the facts, but has to be found and by poetic/artistic work (re)constructed. That was the reason, why their statues were colored like pop art, and why Thukydides’ history book contains poetic inventions as quotes . It is a bit as if in a documentary on e.g. the cold war, suddenly Thatcher, Reagan and Gorbatchev would sing an opera. In contemporary american literature you have this e.g. in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried . Or in Reed’s “Naming of Parts.”. A friend (a great mathematician AND great intellectual ) allowed to illustrate that point by the poem there, scroll down.
Dear jimr..., your confusion could be cured by “reading” and “thinking”. Books and other texts should be taken with respect of their content, nor their age, cover design, typeset, or other features. However, if you want a more recent one, I’d recommend this, as a kind of emergency aid in cases of acute confusion.
My recommendations are entirely caused by the quality of the texts and by their fitting to the question above. That some were written between the beginning and the middle of the 20th century is not quite an accident: That was the time of the science and university revolution in the US: The huge and sudden growth of science education then caused a strong demand on easy to read, unpretentious, well written and high quality introductory texts for the many students from rural, underdeveloped regions and equally undereducated kids from (then, when few and simple machines were in use) unskilled industrial workers.
This comes across as extremely condescending. I didn’t say that I was confused, I said that old books in general tend to be confused. Particularly in philosophy, where clarity, accuracy and academic prestige don’t seem to be well aligned.
Did I write that you said that you are confused? The books I recommended were written for the general readership, and I do not see how your remarks should apply to them. Which books would you recommend?
For Plato, I would discourage most people from beginning with the Parmenides. It’s something of a difficult work, and a lot of people will find it much easier to begin with one of the dialogues that’s about something in particular—best if it’s a topic they already are curious about.