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$1,149.00 (USD)
[These are the official Britannica prices].
Information... Knowledge... Understanding... Wisdom...
From the ancient classics to the
masterpieces of the 20th century, the Great Books are all the
introduction you¿ll ever need to the ideas, stories and discoveries
that have shaped modern civilization. This collection of 517 classics in
60 beautifully bound volumes is color-coded into four subject
categories: literature, history, philosophy, and science. And since this
edition includes works from 20th century authors, it¿s the most
up-to-date collection of the Great Books ever.
Product Details
Reading and understanding great works
by history¿s outstanding minds has always been considered the substance
of a liberal education. The Great Books of the Western World has
been acclaimed as the greatest publishing venture of the 20th Century.
The set now consists of 60 volumes, with 517 works by 130 authors
spanning 30 centuries, on a total of 37,000 pages containing 29 million
words. Among the Great Books¿ 130 authors, 47 are writers of
imaginative literature; 29 are masters of mathematics and/or the natural
sciences; 28 are historians or social scientists, and 28 or more are
philosophers and/or theologians. (This totals 132 because William James
and Alfred North Whitehead have made contributions in both of the latter
two subject categories).
Volume Details
Volumes 1 and 2 of this collection is
the Syntopicon, a unique two-volume guide (not sold separately)
that enables you to investigate a particular idea and compare what
different authors have to say about it. The Syntopicon comprises
a new kind of reference work -- accomplishing for ideas what the
dictionary accomplishes for words and the encyclopaedia accomplishes for
facts. Also included is the Great Conversation, featuring
fascinating background information, extensive timelines, photos, and
quotes from the classic works and their authors.
Special colors on the Great Books¿
spines guide you quickly to the four subject areas -
GREEN: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, and Poetry
| Volume 3 | Homer |
| Volume 4 | Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, Aristophanes |
| Volume 12 | Virgil |
| Volume 19 | Dante, Chaucer |
| Volume 22 | Rabelais |
| Volume 24 | Shakespeare l |
| Volume 25 | Shakespeare ll |
| Volume 27 | Cervantes |
| Volume 29 | Milton |
| Volume 31 | Molière, Racine |
| Volume 34 | Swift, Voltaire, Diderot |
| Volume 45 | Goethe, Balzac |
| Volume 46 | Austen, George Eliot |
| Volume 47 | Dickens |
| Volume 48 | Melville, Twain |
| Volume 51 | Tolstoy |
| Volume 52 | Dostoevsky, Ibsen |
| Volume 59 | Henry James, Shaw, Conrad, Chekhov, Pirandello, Proust, Cather, Mann, Joyce |
| Volume 60 | Woolf, Kafka, Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, O¿Neill, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Brecht, Hemingway, Orwell, Beckett |
RED: Philosophy and Religion
| Volume 6 | Plato |
| Volume 7 | Aristotle l |
| Volume 8 | Aristotle ll |
| Volume 11 | Lucretius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus |
| Volume 16 | Augustine |
| Volume 17 | Aquinas l |
| Volume 18 | Aquinas ll |
| Volume 20 | Calvin |
| Volume 28 | Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza |
| Volume 30 | Pascal |
| Volume 33 | Locke, Berkeley, Hume |
| Volume 39 | Kant |
| Volume 43 | Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche |
| Volume 55 | William James, Bergson, Dewey, Whitehead, Russell, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Barth |
BLUE: History, Politics, Economics, and Ethics
| Volume 5 | Herodotus, Thucydides |
| Volume 13 | Plutarch |
| Volume 14 | Tacitus |
| Volume 21 | Machiavelli, Hobbes |
| Volume 23 | Erasmus, Montaigne |
| Volume 35 | Montesquieu, Rousseau |
| Volume 36 | Adam Smith |
| Volume 37 | Gibbon l |
| Volume 38 | Gibbon ll |
| Volume 40 | J. S. Mill |
| Volume 41 | Boswell |
| Volume 44 | Tocqueville |
| Volume 50 | Marx, Engels |
| Volume 57 | Veblen, Tawney, Keynes |
| Volume 58 | Frazer, Weber, Huizinga, Levi-Strauss |
GREY: Mathematics and Natural Sciences
| Volume 9 | Hippocrates, Galen |
| Volume 10 | Euclid, Archimedes, Nicomachus |
| Volume 15 | Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler |
| Volume 26 | Gilbert, Galileo, Harvey |
| Volume 32 | Newton, Huygens |
| Volume 42 | Lavoisier, Faraday |
| Volume 49 | Darwin |
| Volume 53 | William James |
| Volume 54 | Freud |
| Volume 56 | Poincare, Planck, Whitehead, Einstein, Eddington, Bohr, Hardy, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Dobzhansky, Waddington |
The following are samples of great
thoughts through the ages:
5th Century B.C. - Euripides "--our ancestors handled these matters well by banning their
murderers from public sight, forbidding them to meet or speak to
anyone. But the point is this: they purged their guilt by banishment,
not death. And by so doing, they stopped that endless vicious cycle of
murder and revenge." --- Orestes 17th Century -- Locke "Every man in the state of Nature has the power to kill a
murderer, both to deter others from doing the like injury -- and also
to secure men from the attempts of a criminal who -- hath, by the
unjust violence and slaughter he hath committed upon one, declared war
against all mankind." ---Concerning Civil Government 20th Century -- Shaw "--the human fact remains that the burning of Joan of Arc was
a horror, and that a historian who would defend it would defend
anything. The final criticism of its physical side is implied in
refusal of the Marquesas islanders to be persuaded that the English
did not eat Joan. Why, they ask, should anyone take the trouble to
roast a human being except with that object? They cannot conceive its
being a pleasure. As we have no answer for them that is not shameful
to us, let us blush for our more complicated and pretentious
savagery--" ---St. Joan (Preface)