What are
/r/ClassicalEducation's
favorite Products & Services?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
The most popular Products mentioned in /r/ClassicalEducation:
![The Iliad and the Odyssey;: The heroic story of the Trojan War [and] the fabulous adventures of Odysseus (Giant golden book)](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41rEkBgQwwL._SL500_.jpg)
The most popular Services mentioned in /r/ClassicalEducation:
The Great Courses
LibriVox
Standard Ebooks
Obsidian
The most popular reviews in /r/ClassicalEducation:
Here’s the same one on Amazon. This link pictures the first illustration in the book: https://www.amazon.com/Iliad-Odyssey-fabulous-adventures-Odysseus/dp/B0007DRSGO. I love the Classical Greek style of the illustrations. It’s like the images found in Ancient Greek vases.
That makes sense, but Homer can be clumsy to read. A more easy going start is the trial and death of Socrates. It's introduces the Socratic method and the emotions that starting the classics asks for: curiosity and wonder.
And it's a story, so you get the process and emotions of the classics, along with the emotions of a story. Having a connection to the characters is important, no doubt it was a consideration with your recommendation as well.
And BONUS it's short! So you can finish each selection in an evening and that creates space for pondering the ideas in the selection afterwards.
Here is an affordable one volume set:
I assume it means a collection like this
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0029F1C1U/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Adrian Goldsworthy. How Rome Fell.
Great book. As much as I love Gibbon, he gave rise to a lot of pseudo scholarship.
I also enjoy the works of Peter Brown.
I would recommend reading a secondary source before starting to read Plato or a lot of it will escape you.
I recommend Szlezaks reading Plato (which can be found in the generic library).
Why not start with a sampler platter?
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/
I would check your library and see if Kanopy is available with your card. The courses are streaming on there for free with my library card. If not they are available through the website above. I think it's a subscription type situation.
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000
Ever heard of LibreVox? It's an open source audio book website. If you wanna listen to audio books of the classics, you should check it out.
Here's a couple different versions of The Illiad by Homer (they are different English translations of the same book):
2.) The Illiad (Alexander Pope Translation)
The first one is newer, but which is "best" is just a personal preference. You can just search for any book if there's a particular audio book you'd like.
Standardebooks.org has a good version of The Odyssey, they offer it in pretty much every possible format for free as well. It's a great open source project.
I had forgotten about Mendeley; it is such a great tool. Thanks for the reminder!
If you want to jump into a rabbit hole you could check out the Zettelkasten (/r/Zettelkasten) methodology. It's basically a semi-structured note-taking process that results in a wiki of your notes, with the promise of engendering new ideas by non-obvious connections -- I started using the tool Obsidian to start, though there are many options (the subreddit is a great place to start).
I recently found this book on the fourfold, which has glowing reviews. It's an attempt to articulate his whole late philosophy in terms of the fourfold.
I'm still slogging through being and time, and couldn't make heads or tails of Parmenides, but I loved The Thing even though I didn't quite understand it. I'm hoping that book will help.
I would recommend the Robert Fagles translation. His translation of Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone, were published together by Penguin Classics in a book called The Three Theban plays.
Here's a link to a copy: https://www.amazon.com/Three-Theban-Plays-Penguin-Classics/dp/1439513732/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
I really enjoyed the audio book in this link. The format is similar. I enjoyed it best listening to it on a walk. Sometimes I would have to pause the recording to take a moment to process the ideas that were being purposed and framed. It is one thing to say "I think, therefore I am" it is another to go over the core truth of the statement.
Be aware though, that what is learned cannot be unlearned. You may find that things in your world are not as simple as they first appeared to be.
We read parts of The Idea of a University in our intro philosophy class at the University of Dallas. I didn't understand the project of liberal education very clearly before reading Newman and Plato. It changed my life.
The entire text is quite lengthy, but this slim paperback The Uses Of Knowledge contains his core ideas about liberal education. The writing style is sublime and the insights are profound. I remember carrying it around in my jacket pocket for a week or more.
This edition came highly recommended to me by one of my profs.
I got one of these a few years ago, and now it's always in my backpack.
It's a similar concept, and while not as robust, it's much easier to stow and take with you everywhere. It also makes eating while reading so much easier.
Admittedly, ever since I woke up in The Ronaverse, the portability aspect is less appealing.
Welcome to the sub!
The need for something like this is apparent based on how many recommendation threads have popped up in the last few days. There are lots of places around the web that just list off titles of works, but what people generally seem to want is a very short description of what they can expect from the work and why they should read it.
Maybe this would be a good use for the community wiki as well as we collect these recommendations.
I bought this book right out of college: An Invitation to the Classics edited by one of our highly regarded professors. It was so helpful for guiding my reading since I had heard of many of the writers and texts but didn't know enough about them to know what I might enjoy investing some time in.
I think it might be out of print so I tried to find a pdf of this book online to link here. No such luck, but I did come across this other resource that someone has compiled and organized by genre: A Student's Guide to the Classics. I've only skimmed it, but it looks excellent at first glance.
Yes! Books on writing - any style guide will have tips (Chicago Manual of Style; Turabian, etc.). But there are other books: Strunk and White is a classic (but has some issues). There is this book by Ward Farnsworth which is somewhat popular, Classical English Style. Steven Pinker has a decent book on style, The Sense of Style.
​
Books like these are what I mean t
We used this one in my university class for whatever that’s worth, and I found it not unpleasant to read: https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-America-Harper-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061127922/ref=mp_s_a_1_8?crid=2YWE55TEW8WLK&keywords=democracy+in+america+alexis+de+tocqueville&qid=1666843911&qu=eyJxc2MiOiIzLjQ0IiwicXNhIjoiMy4xOSIsInFzcCI6IjMuMz...
Hoopla has an audiobook copy translated by George Long and Narrorated by Robin Homer for free.
Before reading, you can watch this great summary which will help you digest and understand what you are reading.
Or, you can buy Meditations: A New Translation which was made to be accessible to laymen and is pretty cheap
I recently finished a lecture series from The Great Courses called The Peloponnesian War by Dr. Kenneth Harl. It reviews both Thucydides' work, among others, and other historical evidence to review the conflict. He points out the slight bias Thucydides had for the Athenians and some major misconceptions of the Spartans. I highly recommend it to anyone remotely interested in the topic.
Fred Sommers would disagree:
https://www.amazon.com/Natural-Language-Clarendon-Library-Philosophy/dp/0198247400
From George Englebretsen (The New Syllogistic, New York: Peter Lang 1987):
"Today's orthodox logic came into existence about a hundred years ago when it replaced the traditional syllogistic logic, which itself had been the orthodoxy for many centuries. The arguments for abandoning the old logic were not conclusive. Once entrenched, the new logic felt no need for supporting arguments. Today logic students are given at best some bad old arguments against the old logic, and then are simply presented with the new logic to be learned. No one asks 'Why?'. But Sommers has. He has challenged the deeply entrenched presumption that no syllogistic logic can measure up to the great power and beauty of the predicate calculus. What is more, not only has Sommers shown the emperor to have no clothes, he has produced a fine new suit. He has returned to the venerable but forgotten logic of Aristotle, Ockham, and Leibniz, and has shown that it does have hidden assets which make it more than adequate as an alternative to the orthodox system. So I think this rebellion is well worth joining. And, of course, there's that pleasure I referred to earlier. Sommers speaks of "the perverse pleasure of advocacy-in this day and age-of Aristotle over Frege."I have put this collection together for several reasons. As a supplement to Sommers' own work it illustrates the broad scope of Sommers' challenge to modern orthodox views about logic and language. Not all of those whose work is represented here fully endorse Sommers' programme. Some may explicitly reject parts of it. But all recognize its importance." (Preface by the Editor, pp. X-XI)"
I did some reading on this years ago, but it turned out to be above my present level of understanding - I will be dead before I have time or reason to get a handle on the material. :)
America's Revolutionary Mind which details the private correspondence about ideas and politics, showing the effects of Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers in the 15 years before the American Revolution. Fascinating history.
I have seen this previously. But can’t speak to its quality.
Quadrivium: The Four Classical Liberal Arts of Number Geometry Music and Cosmology https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08FF2C3ZV/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_FHT25RH2D17RSYNTYZS8
Depends on the translation your interested in. Most study bibles are intended to expand someone's faith, so they generally won't be what you're looking for. IMO, the King James Version is what to read from an artistic/literary stand point, as it's up with Shakespeare in terms of influence on English language art and culture. For anyone that might read the KJV, there's a Norton Critical Edition in two volumes, Old Testament and New testament w/ Apocrypha, with annotations that go into history, anthropology, linguistics, and plenty else besides that's quite good.
Oresteia, the Fagles translation. The introduction is amazing. ("A Reading of the 'Oresteia': the Serpent and the Eagle").
Thanks for posting the link, I should have posted the ebook and audiobook that I made this video with:
Although I guess you could just mute the video if you wanted text only.
I'm going to be using the Robert Fagles translation. His translations of both Iliad and Odyssey are excellent and it's helped that there is an audiobook version available as well on Audible.
I really like Mortimer J. Adler's Great Ideas Program. It is a 10-volume set with reading guides on different subjects. The first volume, Introduction to Liberal Education, is an excellent overview that starts with the Greeks and ends with Marx.
You can get the set here: https://www.amazon.com/Great-Ideas-Program-10-Set/dp/B008CG3SK8
It's meant to accompany the Great Books of the Western World set but you can still just use different editions (as long as your willing to find the right pages).
I have Rolfe Humphries translation. I enjoy it. It is easy to follow and great annotation.
Oh, and on kids and Dante....I think any high schooler could be read it. Some background knowledge makes the text more fun, so if the student has read some Homer, Virgil, maybe some Augustine, etc....they'll just enjoy it more. Some students might struggle through it, of course. But part of the aim of reading, it seems to me, is to find texts worth struggling with!
Some students in middle school might be able to handle it, but I'd probably be a little more judicious about handing it out. A bad early experience of a text can turn someone off from it for a lifetime.
[deletes long rant about how we ruin people's love for Shakespeare in high school]
As to children, I've never tried any of the children's adaptations of the Divine Comedy. But they are out there.
The 'ideal age' is, of course, person-dependent. There are themes within the DC that would resonate with any age. The depictions of the Inferno might grip any kid, the artistic dimensions of the Purgatorio might resonate with some more aesthetically oriented children, and religious children might be enthusiastic about experiencing a journey through the Paradiso. I think there's a lot of priming that can be done with children so that they are excited to read a book when they're able to. (I have attended a Shakespeare play with a six year old, who asked extremely intelligent questions about it afterward.) So I think the ideal age is when a child would be interested and has the maturity and capacity to glimpse enough of the text's power so they love it for a lifetime, or at least see that it might be worth trying to revisit at some point in the future.
The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary
The above books (not including Bloom's Book of J) add up to over 6000 pages. 6074 pages / 365 days = 16.6 pages per day. So it could be done in a year.
A relaxed approach is to read a summary of the story with major points, that way you already have the events of the story and can concentrate on how it plays out when you read the text itself.
The summary from Bulfinch's Mythology is alright
https://sacred-texts.com/cla/bulf/bulf26.htm
A method I really enjoy is reading a kids version of the story first. This one by Gillian Cross is really fun!
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/076369813X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_fabc_Y6DDA5E3G0BP93TV2NCD
And the kids version can also be kept for your own kids or gifted to a book loving kid. So it has multiple uses.
That’s a pretty good list. I wouldn’t bother with Chomsky though. His linguistics work is exceptional and if correct entirely reconfigures not just our understanding of language but of human evolution. His political works are just the typical hypocritical liberal finger pointing you get from people who racket on about injustice but who all happen to be millionaires. Politics of resentment. A better and more penetrating contemporary work on a similar line is Dennen’s Why Liberalism Failed https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Liberalism-Failed-Politics-Culture/dp/0300223447
Further, while the Communist Manifesto is influential and famous it is by Marx’s own admission a poor example of his thought. Something like the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is a far superior work and far more relevant today.
Finally, while there is some excellent philosophy in your selection you haven’t picked anyone who is concerned with epistemology and the limits of knowing. Fundamentals that any serious scholar should know. Therefore I cannot recommend Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding more highly. It is short and will entirely change the way you think. Good luck!!!
I dislike poetic translations. That being said Stephen Mitchell does a really accessible poetic translation. I actually bought it, lost it, and bought it again because it is so easy to read.
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/1439163383/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_fabc_5KSRW4V6KC6ED3WVQ3MD
Reading through the Odyssey right now; hoping to finish soon so I don’t miss the boat on The Divine Comedy!
I also wanted to read <em>The Discarded Image</em> by C.S. Lewis alongside Dante.
Boccaccio's Decameron, Rebhorn translation.
Ten youth in 14th century Florence flee the plague in their home city. Now safely in an idyllic country retreat, they take turns telling stories of love and adventure to each other. The stories are often hilarious (and raunchy!) and feel so personal and real even after seven centuries. People really don't change!
Rebhorn's translation makes me want to learn Italian! He does a great job of translating the puns and wordplays into English, but the notes explain what gets lost in English. Even so, the prose is great to read.
Highly recommended! You can pick it up for a few minutes (the individual stories are often short) or sit there engrossed for hours, making everyone around you wonder why you are laughing so much. 'Send the devil back to hell!'
Immortal Poems of the English Language is a classic anthology that has been around for decades if you want a good cross-section. I got a used copy for $3 somewhere. https://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Poems-English-Language-Williams/dp/0671496107
TO be clear you are asking about a MASSIVE area of literature. I’d say the above is a good place to start but be sure to consider looking into Ancient Greek and Chinese poetry as well.
This only covers English language, but it is very good.
The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost
https://www.amazon.com/Best-Poems-English-Language-Chaucer/dp/0060540419
My husband and I did a tiny jigsaw puzzle of this last winter. The finished puzzle was about 12” by 16”. We had to use a magnifying glass and tweezers to get it done. Great fun
I don’t waste my time with people who call objection to ideology “racist”. Islam is absolutely terrible. They can’t even understand the concept of women’s freedoms.
The work of dr. Bill warner is extensive and on point on these issues.
Here’s another source:
Buy his book here and educate yourself: https://www.amazon.de/dp/1928653111?tag=duckduckgo-iphone-de-21&linkCode=osi&th=1&psc=1