Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life
Added by: camhuy | Karma: 1388.27 | Black Hole | 13 January 2011
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Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life
What makes a written work eternal—its message still so fundamental to the way we live that it continues to speak to us, hundreds or thousands of years distant from the lifetime of its author?
Why do we still respond to an ancient Greek playwright's tale of the Titan so committed to humanity's survival that he is willing to endure eternal torture in his defiance of the gods? To the cold advice of a 16th-century Florentine exiled from the corridors of power? To the words of a World War I German veteran writing of the horrors of endless trench warfare?
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Gödel, Escher - Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Twenty years after it topped the bestseller charts, Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is still something of a marvel. Besides being a profound and entertaining meditation on human thought and creativity, this book looks at the surprising points of contact between the music of Bach, the artwork of Escher, and the mathematics of Gödel. It also looks at the prospects for computers and artificial intelligence (AI) for mimicking human thought. For the general reader and the computer techie alike, this book still sets a standard for thinking about the future of computers and their relation to the way we think.
Added by: Kahena | Karma: 11524.33 | Fiction literature | 11 November 2010
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After Many a Summer
After Many a Summer (1939) is a novel by Aldous Huxley that tells the story of a Hollywood millionaire who fears his impending death; it was published in the USA as After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. This satire raises philosophical and social issues, some of which would later take the forefront in Huxley's final novel Island. The title is taken from Tennyson's poem Tithonus, about a figure in Greek mythology to whom Aurora, the goddess of dawn, gave eternal life but not eternal youth. The book was awarded the 1939 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.
36 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture) Course No. 4460 Taught by Robert C. Bartlett Emory University Ph.D., Boston College For more than two millennia, philosophers have grappled with life's most profound issues. It is easy to forget, however, that these "eternal" questions are not eternal at all; rather, they once had to be asked for the first time. It was the Athenian citizen and philosopher Socrates who first asked these questions in the 5th century B.C. "Socrates," notes award-winning Professor Robert C. Bartlett, "was responsible for a fundamentally new way of philosophizing": trying to understand the world by reason.
36 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)
