Concept
The great books are those that tradition, and various institutions and authorities, have regarded as constituting or best expressing the foundations of Western culture (the Western canon is a similar but broader designation); derivatively the term also refers to a curriculum or method of education based around a list of such books. Mortimer Adler lists three criteria for including a book on the list:
- the book has contemporary significance; that is, it has relevance to the problems and issues of our times;
- the book is inexhaustible; it can be read again and again with benefit; "This is an exacting criterion, an ideal that is fully attained by only a small number of the 511 works that we selected. It is approximated in varying degrees by the rest."
- the book is relevant to a large number of the great ideas and great issues that have occupied the minds of thinking individuals for the last 25 centuries.
Read more about this topic: Great Books
Famous quotes containing the word concept:
“The latest creed that has to be believed
And entered in our childish catechism
Is that the All’s a concept self-conceived,
Which is no more than good old Pantheism.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“To find the length of an object, we have to perform certain
physical operations. The concept of length is therefore fixed when the operations by which length is measured are fixed: that is, the concept of length involves as much as and nothing more than the set of operations by which length is determined.”
—Percy W. Bridgman (1882–1961)
“By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)