There is an invaluable on-line concordance for many of the Great Books. Examine the author index and the book list.

Here is a partial list of the works currently included:

Aesop's Fables / Aeschylus - 7 Plays / Alcott, Louisa May - novels / Aristotle / Aristophanes - 12 plays / Augustine - Confessions and Enchiridion / Austen, Jane - all novels / Barrie, J. M. - Peter Pan / Baum, L. Frank - Wizard of Oz / Bible / Beowulf / Bierce, Ambrose (wonderful satire!) / Blake, William - Selected Poetry / Bronte sisters - novels / Bunyan, John - Pilgrim's Progress, Holy War / Burnett, Frances - The Secret Garden / Byron, Lord / Carroll, Lewis - Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass / Cervantes - Don Quixote / Chaucer - Canterbury Tales / Chesterton, G. K. / Children's: Fairy Tales, Lewis Carroll's Alice and Looking-Glass, Aesop's / Fables, Beatrix Potter / Civil War Books / Collins, Willkie: Moonstone, Woman in White / Cooper, James Fenimore - novels / Devotional: Cloud of Unknowing, Eddy - Science and Health / Dante - Divine Comedy / Defoe, Daniel / Dickens, Charles - 19 works / Dickinson, Emily - Selected Poetry / Dostoevsky / Dumas - novels / Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) / Epictetus / Emerson, Ralph Waldo / Euripides - 21 plays / Exotic Literature / Fairy Tale Books - Andrew Lang / Federalist Papers - Alex. Hamilton, et. al. / French and Spanish: Cervantes - Don Quixote, Hugo - Les Miserables / Gibbon - Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire / Gilbert & Sullivan Plays / Grant, U.S. - Personal Memoirs / Goethe / Hardy, Thomas / Hawthorne / Herodotus / Historical books: Federalist Papers, Livy, Josephus, J & S Tanner / Homer - Works / Hugo, Victor - Les Miserables / Hume, David / Infidels Paradise: Ingersoll, Hobbes, Voltaire / James, Henry / James, William / Johnson, Samuel / Johnson, Ben / Joyce, James - novels / Kant - Critique of Pure Reason, Practical Reason, Judgment / Kempis, Thomas 'a - Imitation of Christ / Kipling - novels and poems / The Holy Quran, translated by Maulvi Sher Ali / Lawrence, D. H. / Heb, Josephus / Lewis, Sinclair / Livy, History of Rome / London, Jack - novels / Longfellow / Machiavelli - The Prince / Melville / Milton / Montaigne - Essays / More, Sir Thomas / Nietzsche / Nostrodamus / Omar Khayyam - Rubaiyat / Ovid / Plato - Dialogues / Plotinus / Poe, Edgar Allan / Potter, Beatrix - children's stories / Plutarch's Lives / Riley, James Whitcombe / Sanger, Margaret / Scott, Sir Walter - 10 major works plus a biography / Scriptures: Bible, Apocrypha, Koran, Bhagavad-Gita, Tao Te Chung, Confucius / Shakespeare: Works / Sherlock Holmes, Complete Works Combined, 4 novels - Doyle, A. Conan / Sophocles / Starr Report, White House Rebuttal, Clinton Grand Jury Testimony / Stevenson, Robert Louis - 6 books / Stowe, Harriet Beecher / Sun-Tzu, The Art of War / Swift, Jonathan / Tacitus - Histories / Tennyson, Alfred Lord / Thackeray, William Makepeace / Thoreau, Henry David / Tolstoy, Leo - novels / Thucydides - Histories / Trollope, Anthony / Mark Twain: Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Puddinhead Wilson / Jules Verne - novels / Virgil - Aeneid / Wells, H. G. / Wallace, Lew - Ben Hur / White, Ellen / Wilde, Oscar / Whitman, Walt / Zola, Emile.

* Many thanks to Kevin Borgard for bringing this to our attention.

MORE ON BUCKLEY VS. BLACKMUN

I, too, was turned off by Buckley's attack on Justice Blackmun, and so appreciated your sending out Prof. Sinaiko's response, which is as thoughtful as one would expect from his other writings. Other than his point #3 (even a policy of keeping abortion a private matter must be a *public* policy, and the issue of whether to treat abortion as a form of homicide is a legitimate one), I agree with everything he says and with its spirit.

Jay Gold

Mr. Sinaiko, in his criticisms of Mr. Buckley, shows clearly his own lack of appreciation for philosophical principle. To be brief, he cleaves science from moral philosophy, which is but to treat ethics according to opinion. He presumes rather naively and without justification that there is a distinction between private and public acts, with the implication that man is not essentially a social animal, but only when he so desires. And, finally, he conceives rights independently of right action, which makes these rights arbitrary, unstable, and ultimately unjustifiable.

Mr. Sinaiko would like to see a more civilized atmosphere a la Carthage. But human sacrifice is not civilized behavior, whether we sacrifice to Moloch or to our own selfish inclinations. True civility requires the practice of virtue and the recognition that we are essentially social creatures. Civility concerns what we have as a common temporal end, so let no man be above the moral law. Let us praise what is good and condemn what is evil, without obsequious respect for persons. Let us place the good of the "res publica" before our individual temporal goods. In short, let us begin to be honest again, with ourselves and with our countrymen, no matter how much this disturbs their complacency. This is our duty. And therefore it is our right.

Jeffrey C. Kalb, Jr.

In addressing this to Herman Sinaiko I shall try not to be meanspirited. While I may have not used the exact wording in Mr. Buckley's obituary of Justice Blackmun, I agree with Mr. Buckley in principal. Therefor Mr. Sinaiko's letter was also addressed to me.

I have just finished listening to the heartbeat of a new great grandchild in the womb of the mother; a new life human in the making.

Would it be unfair of me to ask, "Is it only a matter of ETHICS, or a POLITICAL decision, to stop that heartbeat?" If you say it is the mother's decision to stop that heartbeat, especially if she cooperated in the copulation, then I hear a monster's decision. (By the way, I would not compound the error by killing the decision maker). Both, the man and the woman, became sponsors and patrons of that new heartbeat they started. I struggle to reconcile a divergent opinion; yet this fact always arises: to stop a heartbeat is killing.

That human in production (you call it a fetus), is ready to enter a land promising life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is called birthing. Mr. Sinaiko, you claim that it has no constitutional standing one second before birth, or while in the birth canal, but one second after leaving that birth canal it does. I can't help but wonder who the constitutional lawyers were that came to that decision. On what constitution was the template used: the old one or the new one?

I'm listening again to that heartbeat. No one is threatening to stop it. "Thunk, swish, thunk, swish, thunk, swish" My dear great grandchild in the making, I shudder when the courts of this great country, have ruled your destruction as immaterial! For God's sake!

Karl Krudop

Unlike Herman Siniako, I do not find the article written by William Buckley, "outrageous, intemperate, imprudent and thoroughly ungentlemanly," nor Buckley's manner "insulting and inappropriate." I find, instead, Buckley's article provocative in another sense, in a way that incites the mind rather than the emotions. While I don't agree with everything Buckley says, he does ask a significant question: "was the prenatal Harry Blackmun a person?". Well, was he? Was the man who opined in behalf of abortion a person while in his mother's womb? Or was he just a thing, an it, and not really alive and human? And, what if Harry Blackmun had never been born, had ceased to exist, had been aborted? Did Harry Blackmun become Harry Blackmun only at the moment of birth, when he could be seen, heard, and held, and officially accorded a name? Was Harry Blackmun's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness only a right to be conferred by fully developed humans at whatever point they or their man-made laws judged life to begin, whether that be at conception, or at three months or six months, or at birth or later? Or was Harry Blackmun naturally endowed with the right to life because he is by nature human? Finally, should the pursuit of happiness within a community include the freedom to abort? And, is abortion a real good -- or do many people deem it good?

Kathryn Ludrick

MORE ON MULTICULTURALISM

Mr. Boleyn's remarks on multiculturalism are interesting and provocative and well worth further reflection. However, he makes one point which I think is simply inaccurate and needs correction. It is a point of considerable importance in our efforts to understand and come to terms with the contemporary debates centering on and stimulated by what is called "multiculturalism."

Mr. Boleyn, in an effort to recast the debate in a larger historical frame says that it goes back, not merely to the 1960's, but has been "endemic in this century." In fact even this expanded historical perspective is far too foreshortened in my opinion. Multiculturalism, and its more general philosophical principle, relativism, is much, much older. It goes back, within (before?) the Western tradition, to the generations immediately before Socrates, and its advocates were called Sophists. It is, interestingly enough, in response to the pre-Socratic natural philosophers and the relativistic Sophists (who drew their fundamental philosophical principles from those early natural philosophers) that Socrates, as Cicero says, brought philosophy down from the heavens into the cities, introduced her even into private houses and compelled her to ask questions about life and morality and things good and evil." That is to say, the Socratic search for the permanent intelligible order of things, including the human concerns with "good and evil" began historically as a reaction to the relativistic Sophists such as Protagoras, Gorgias, Thrasymachus, who are so brilliantly portrayed in Plato's Dialogues. The fountainhead of our Western tradition begins, as Whitehead and so many others have seen, with the Dialogues of Plato, those works that permanently embody that fundamental Socratic search. So relativism has always been there; it is a permanent possibility inherent in the search for meaning and truth embodied in philosophy. That is what makes it both so attractive and so dangerous. As Socrates (and Plato) saw the Sophist is indeed a kind of philosopher and his relativism is real philosophical position with considerable basis in reality. It is not that relativism is wrong, it is rather that it is only partially right and thus needs correction and supplementing by further thought.

My recommendation: Reread Plato's "Protagoras", especially the big speech by Protagoras near the beginning of the dialogue in which he expounds his general position in a brilliant myth and argument. To further explore the issues raised by Protagoras go on to read the "Theaetetus" which deals with the Protagorean relativism in relation to knowledge, and the "Sophist" which takes up the ontological implications of the Sophistic position.

In sum: the heated contemporary debates centering on Multiculturalism reopen, though often in a distressingly superficial way, the ancient and fundamental and permanent questions and arguments with which our Western tradition began. At that beginning Socrates was equal to the challenge, let us hope that in our time we are too.

Herman Sinaiko

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