>The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator.
>The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.
It is often amazing actually how approachable some of the classic books are.
It's an interesting argument. Without having read e.g. Plato's Republic myself, is the novice likely to learn as much or more from reading a direct translation as they are from its Wikipedia page and some commentaries?
I read Plato's Republic a long time ago now and, both from my memory and looking at translations online just now, it's approachable and comprehensible.
I would argue yes, at least for Plato in particular, the commentaries take their time to discuss the topics in the so-called "Socratic" style, and its easy to engage with the arguments and counter-arguments directly. I think with a commentary you risk reading someone else's opinion, without challenging yourself to form your own. It's more-or-less equivalent to doing the exercises in a math text rather than just reading the chapters and letting the author convince you that you understand.
Obviously the ideal is the read the source material and then read commentaries after once you've had a chance to reflect on it for yourself.
Of course for me, I have only ever managed to read Plato and Karl Popper. Other "Classics" like Hume or Kant I can't make heads of tails of the source material without some guidance. I haven't even tried the most notoriously
dense authors like Nietsche or Hegel.
The novice is less likely to learn from a direct reading of Plato's Republic than to absorb Socrates's arguments and ingest enormous amounts of food for thought.
The novice will then have the capacity to think more seriously about current or historical political questions and devise better responses or approaches to them (better for the novice and better for our societies).
Always go to the masters first - the Platos, the Keynes, the Freuds... They're by far the best exponents of their own thinking.
For most of human history a single book took months or years of work by a skilled worker to make a single copy. It follows that our predecessors copied those books believed to be of value. This filtering process continued for many dozens of generations. Due to this selection mechanism it’s unsurprising that the quality of the surviving works is so high.
No, this isn’t true. It was only for a period of a thousand years (500-1500) in Europe between the loss of the papyrus paper making industry, and the advent of the pulp-linen paper making industry. This latter period happened to coincide with movable type.
For instance, reading, writing and access to scrolls was fairly widespread in the Roman Empire — it was one of the well-known ways for a slave to self-emancipate. (They could earn pay as a scribe.)
I was referring to the time labor cost. The actual copying was done by hand and doing so without error is harder than it sounds. It’s one thing to have your forum shopping list written down and quite another entirely to copy out the Aeneid, regardless of whether you’re writing on papyrus, paper, or parchment.
Great PBS doc on this recently, describing paper as info tech. The manufacturing process was so cheap in China they literally had blank notebooks for sale to the general public. The Persians or Arabs (don’t remember which) coaxed the manufacturing process out of some captured folks, which eventually made its way to Europe as well. Movable type was the next huge advancement.
Because ancient authors were often aiming more at an oral, less of a literary, tradition, their arguments tend to be more clearly structured and signposted than modern commentary. A listener can't go back and reread, which forces the speaker to be more lucid.
Definitely a good selection of books, just a note that the actual books in the series sometimes have quite small print and aren't the most comfortable way to read. I'd recommend using the list and then checking for recent translations/editions of the books.
I’m of the opposite opinion. I like the two-column structure and there’s just enough space to sketch in the margins.
Also, if you can get a whole set I highly recommend it. It’s pretty convenient having so many great works in one place and when coupled with the syntopicon it really is a treasure.
You might check out the list of books in Harvard Classics library, which were intended to be "enough books to give a liberal education to anyone who would read them with devotion."
I recently read the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin which was I think was from this collection. Particularly as a non American (so lacking his featuring highly in my primary education), I found this really intriguing insight into a brilliant entrapreneurial operator and public figure.
>The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.
It is often amazing actually how approachable some of the classic books are.
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