RamistThomist
Puritanboard Clerk
Adler, Mortimer. The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon vol. 1.
I didn’t consider myself educated until I started working through this book. The program is simple: one can either read straight through multiple Great Books, and/or read through the entries in the syntopicon, gain a working understanding of the issue, and then follow up the passages at the end of the chapter. (I’ll illustrate later). Syntopical reading at its basic level is reading simultaneous books/passages about a single topic. If we go deeper, syntopical reading means interacting with what an author said about previous authors on the same topic.
The syntopical approach is what separates this volume from other anthologies. (Anthologies are about as valuable as school textbooks.)
Being, an example
Let’s take the most important philosophical concept in Western history: being. I’ll provide some brief highlights from the text and then post pictures of the reference system.
I didn’t consider myself educated until I started working through this book. The program is simple: one can either read straight through multiple Great Books, and/or read through the entries in the syntopicon, gain a working understanding of the issue, and then follow up the passages at the end of the chapter. (I’ll illustrate later). Syntopical reading at its basic level is reading simultaneous books/passages about a single topic. If we go deeper, syntopical reading means interacting with what an author said about previous authors on the same topic.
The syntopical approach is what separates this volume from other anthologies. (Anthologies are about as valuable as school textbooks.)
Being, an example
Let’s take the most important philosophical concept in Western history: being. I’ll provide some brief highlights from the text and then post pictures of the reference system.
- With the exception of few other terms, only being is common to all kinds of things (127).
- A contingent being is one whose essence can be divorced from existence; a necessary being is one whose essence is identical to existence (129).
- Since being itself is that whereby a thing is, being belongs primarily to God and to all other things according to modes of derivation or participation.