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Hippolytus
(Ἱππολυτος) Euripides 429 BC (Disaster ensues when Phaedra falls for her stepson!) The gods will have their play, and we piteous humans must suffer in double jeopardy. First, vice will eventually bring destruction, and yet we are by nature weak and prone to vice. Second, everyone is subject to fate, which is not kinder to […]
Apology of Socrates
(Απολογια Σωκρατους) Plato 4th century BC (An innocent man delivers an inspiring speech to the court before he is executed.) Socrates is a bit of a mystery, if you insist on being a real evidentiary hardliner. He wrote nothing himself, so we have to rely on others’ characterizations of him. Xenophon paints him as the […]
A Sand County Almanac
Aldo Leopold 1948 (An ecologist contemplates and celebrates the land, and recommends an expansion of our moral world.) In today’s courses on ecology, forestry, conservation, environmental philosophy or land use, three personalities are routinely introduced as the fathers of modern concern for nature, the three who first and most strongly urged us to enlarge our […]
Lyrical Ballads, and other early poems
William Wordsworth 1785-1799 (A poetic sage takes lessons on goodness and beauty from nature.) A man of wisdom, a poet of nature, is Wordsworth. These are the goals to which he aspires, goals that are discernable in his work from a very early age. He wrote many of his greatest poems in the years covered […]
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
December 28, 2014 / Leave a comment
Harriet Beecher Stowe 1852 (Two slaves struggle mightily: one for her liberty, the other for his integrity.) This novel, the best selling book in the nineteenth century besides the Bible, is a remarkably forceful argument against the world’s most blatant form of widespread institutionalized violation of human rights. It is a collage of slave lives and […]
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