READING
THE WORLD
READING THE WORLD
Ideas That Matter
THIRD EDITION
MICHAEL AUSTIN
B
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NEW YORK LONDON
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reading the world: ideas that matter / edited by Michael Austin.—Third edition pages cm—(Third edition). Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-393-93630-8 (pbk.)
1. College readers. 2. English language—Rhetoric—Problems, exercises, etc. 3. Critical thinking—Problems, exercises, etc. I. Austin, Michael, 1966 II. Title
PE1417.R396 2015
808'.0427—dc23 20140338120
Instructor's Edition ISBN: 978-0-393-93845-6
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Contents
Preface xv Timeline xxi Pronunciation Guide xxvii
part 1 reading the world
1 EDUCATION 3
HSUN TZU Encouraging Learning 5
To pursue [learning] is to be a man, to give it up is to become a beast. SENECA On Liberal and Vocational Studies 13
I have no respect for any study whatsoever if its end is the making of money.
* LAURENTIUS DE VOLTOLINA Liber Ethicorum des Henricus de Alemania 21
A painting of a class lecture at one of the medieval world's most famous universities.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS Learning to Read 24
I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy.
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN from Knowledge Its Own End 31
Knowledge is capable of being its own end. Such is the constitution of the human mind, that any kind of knowledge, if it be really such, is its own reward.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE To Teachers 40
In this critical period, the child's life is subjected to the education factory, lifeless, colorless, dissociated from the context of the universe, within bare white walls staring like eyeballs of the dead.
0 Image
VIRGINIA WOOLF Shakespeare's Sister 46
It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.
RICHARD FEYNMAN O Americano Outra Vez 53
After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn't know what anything meant.
MARTHA NUSSBAUM Education for Profit, Education for Democracy 61
From early on, leading U.S. educators connected the liberal arts to the preparation of informed, independent, and sympathetic democratic citizens.
2 HUMAN NATURE AND THE MIND 71
PLATO The Speech of Aristophanes 74
Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.
MENCIUS Man's Nature Is Good 78
Human nature is inherently good, just like water flows inherently downhill.
HSUN TZU Man's Nature Is Evil 84
Man's nature is evil; goodness is the result of conscious activity.
THOMAS HOBBES from Leviathan 94
. . . wherein men live without other security than what their own strength. . . . In such condition there is no place for industry . . . no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
JOHN LOCKE Of Ideas 100
Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: How comes it to be furnished? . . . Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience.
0 Two Pictures of the Brain 104
A phrenology chart and a PET scan offer two images of the brain.
0 CARL JUNG from The Red Book 108
An illustration from the psychiatrist journal of calligraphy, drawings, and writings.
RUTH BENEDICT The Individual and the Pattern of Culture 112
No individual can arrive even at the threshold of his potentialities without a culture in which he participates. Conversely, no civilization has in it any element which in the last analysis is not the contribution of an individual.
NICHOLAS CARR A Thing Like Me 123
Every tool imposes limitations even as it opens possibilities.
DANIEL KAHNEMAN from Thinking, Fast and Slow 134
Conflict between an automatic reaction and an intention to control it is common in our lives.
3 LANGUAGE AND RHETORIC 145
0 AESCHYLUS The Eumenides 148
Accept my argument. Don't let rash tongues / hurl threats against this land, condemning it / to sterile fruitlessness. Ease your anger.
PERICLES The Funeral Oration 158
In sum, I say that our city as a whole is a lesson for Greece, and that each of us presents himself as a self-sufficient individual, disposed to the widest possible diversity of actions, with every grace and great versatility. This is not merely a boast in words for the occasion, but the truth in fact.
PLATO from Gorgias 166