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Preface to Plato

10 best books like Preface to Plato (Eric Alfred Havelock): Technics and Civilization, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, The Singer of Tales, The Philosophy of Aristotle, Acts of Religion, The Origins of Greek Thought, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, The Presocratics, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks

Technics and Civilization
AuthorLewis Mumford
Writing in the early 1930's Lewis Mumford offers a sweeping viewing of technological development over the past thousand years of human history. But Mumford is far from a simple chronicler of technological achievement and failure. As Langdon Winner observes in his introduction to the book, Mumford...
The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making
AuthorAdrian Johns
ISBN0226401227
In The Nature of the Book, a tour de force of cultural history, Adrian Johns constructs an entirely original and vivid picture of print culture and its many arenas—commercial, intellectual, political, and individual.

"A compelling exposition of how authors, printers, booksellers and...
The Singer of Tales
AuthorAlbert Bates Lord
ISBN0674808819
This 40th anniversary edition of Albert Lord's classic work includes a unique enhancement: a CD containing the original audio recordings of all the passages of heroic songs quoted in the book; a video publication of the kinescopic filming of the most valued of the singers; and selected photographs...
The Philosophy of Aristotle
AuthorAristotle
ISBN0451627830
Socrates and his God (May 2004)

Given what we hear from him in The Apology, it is not clear why Socrates “follows” his God, Apollo. There is evidence to support three explanations: 1) because he is compelled to; 2) because he wants to enable goodness; and 3) out of self-interest.

At...
Acts of Religion
AuthorJacques Derrida
ISBN0415924006
Acts of Religion, compiled in close association with Jacques Derrida, brings together for the first time a number of Derrida's writings on religion and questions of faith and their relation to philosophy and political culture. The essays discuss religious texts from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim...
The Origins of Greek Thought
AuthorJean-Pierre Vernant
ISBN0801492939
Jean-Pierre Vernant's concise, brilliant essay on the origins of Greek thought relates the cultural achievement of the ancient Greeks to their physical and social environment and shows that what they believed in was inseparable from the way they lived. The emergence of rational thought, Vernant...
Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
AuthorWalter J. Ong
ISBN0415281296
This classic work explores the vast differences between oral and literate cultures offering a very clear account of the intellectual, literary and social effects of writing, print and electronic technology.

In the course of his study, Walter J. Ong offers fascinating insights into oral...
The Presocratics
AuthorPhilip Ellis Wheelwright
The grouping/historical period of the Presocratics remains very interesting to me still even years after first reading this book in the fall of 2003. I feel this way partly because they were some of the earliest philosophers known to history but also because many of their ideas were remarkably ahead...
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
AuthorElizabeth L. Eisenstein
ISBN0521299551
Off Clay Shirky:

Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial treatment of Gutenberg’s invention, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, opens with a recounting of her research into the early history of the printing press. She was able to find many descriptions of life in the early 1400s, the...
The Exploit: A Theory of Networks
AuthorAlexander R. Galloway
ISBN0816650446
“The Exploit is that rare thing: a book with a clear grasp of how networks operate that also understands the political implications of this emerging form of power. It cuts through the nonsense about how 'free' and 'democratic' networks supposedly are, and it offers a rich analysis of how network protocols...
Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, 3 Vols
AuthorWerner Wilhelm Jaeger
Each volume was conceived as an independent unit, [Vol 1-Archaic Greece, The Mind of Athens; Vol 2-In Search of the Divine Centre; Vol 3-The Conflict of Cultural Ideas in the Age of Plato], taken together they constitute a monumental integrated survey of the whole Greek cultural tradition in the early...
The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia
AuthorEpicurus
ISBN0872202410
A total philosophy of life, death, religion, science, ethics, and culture promising liberation from the obstacles that stand in the way of our happiness, the teachings of Epicurus claimed many thousand committed followers all over the ancient Mediterranean world and deeply influenced later European...
Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences
AuthorGeoffrey C. Bowker
ISBN0262522950
A revealing and surprising look at how classification systems can shape both worldviews and social interactions.

What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include "fainted in a bath," "frighted," and "itch"); the identification of South Africans during apartheid...
Mythical Thought (The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, #2)
AuthorErnst Cassirer
ISBN0300000383
The Symbolic Forms has long been considered the greatest of Cassirer’s works.  Into it he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science—the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which man has expressed himself...
The Bias of Communication
AuthorHarold A. Innis
ISBN0802068391
One of the most influential books ever published in Canada, "The Bias of Communication" has played a major part in reshaping our understanding of what constitutes history. It is a collection of essays by one of Canada's greatest historians, on a subject that opened broad new avenues of thought on the...
Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf
AuthorBenjamin Lee Whorf
ISBN0262730065
The pioneering linguist Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941) grasped the relationship between human language and human thinking: how language can shape our innermost thoughts. His basic thesis is that our perception of the world and our ways of thinking about it are deeply influenced by the structure of...
The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800
AuthorLucien Febvre
ISBN1859841082
Books, & the printed word more generally, are aspects of modern life that are all too often taken for granted. Yet the emergence of the book was a process of immense historical importance & heralded the dawning of the epoch of modernity. In this much praised history of that process, Lucien Febvre...
Aquinas
AuthorFrederick Charles Copleston
ISBN0140136746
An Introduction to the Life & Work of the Great Medieval Thinker

Aquinas (1224-74) lived at a time when the Christian West was opening up to a wealth of Greek and Islamic philosophical speculation. An embodiment of the thirteenth-century ideal of a unified interpretation of reality (in...
The Greeks and the Irrational
AuthorE.R. Dodds
ISBN0520003276
In this philosophy classic, first published in 1951, E.R. Dodds takes on the traditional view of Greek culture as a triumph of rationalism. Using the analytical tools of modern anthropology & psychology, he asks, "Why should we attribute to the ancient Greeks an immunity from 'primitive' modes...
Gods, Heroes and Men of Ancient Greece: Mythology's Great Tales of Valor and Romance
AuthorW.H.D. Rouse
ISBN0451527909
s/t: Mythology's Great Tales of Valor & Romance
Life among the gods and goddesses of Ancient Greece was a pretty lively affair. Take the day that the great god Zeus asked his son to split open his head with an ax...or the time Apollo "kidnapped" a boadload of Cretans so he'd have someone to worship...
How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
AuthorN. Katherine Hayles
ISBN0226321460
In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others...
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