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Great Books of the Western World
Published by Encyclopaedia Britannica
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Published by Encyclopaedia Britannica
LifeWisdom.com began selling the Great Books online in 1999. We now sell the set as an Amazon.com Associate. If you would like to purchase the Great Books, kindly follow one of the links on the left so we may receive a small referral fee from Amazon.com. That allows us to bring you the rest of this web site for free.
Amazon.com's price, which can include shipping, is usually significantly less than Encyclopaedia Britannica's list price, which does not include shipping.
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).
Additionally, the 2-volume Syntopicon lists some 3,020 topics under the 102 Great Ideas and refers you to every significant statement on that topic by the authors in the Great Books. It is as though all 517 works in the Great Books had been read 3,020 times --each time with a particular question in mind: What do the great authors have to say about this particular topic?
Volume Details
Volumes 1 and 2 are 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.
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 I
Volume 25 Shakespeare II
Volume 27 Cervantes
Volume 29 Milton
Volume 31 Moliere, 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 I
Volume 8 Aristotle II
Volume 11 Lucretius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus
Volume 16 Augustine
Volume 17 Aquinas I
Volume 18 Aquinas II
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