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THE GREAT IDEAS ONLINE A Syntopical Approach to the Great Books Getting more information is learning, and so is coming to understand what you did not understand before. But there is an important difference between these two kinds of learning. To be informed is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is the same, in what respects it is different, and so forth. This distinction is familiar in terms of the differences between being able to remember something and being able to explain it. If you remember what an author says, you have learned something from reading him. If what he says is true, you have even learned something about the world. --Mortimer Adler HOW TO READ A DIFFICULT BOOK We are pleased to offer you Peter Redpath's new book, How to Read a Difficult Book. Peter is a member of the Center and Professor of Philosophy at St. John's University, Staten Island, New York. He is also Editor of Studies in the History of Western Philosophy (SHWP), Deputy Executive Editor of Value Inquiry Book Series (VIBS) and is closely associated with both the American Maritain Association, and the Yves Simon Institute. If you are interested in obtaining a copy, please use order form below. A modest portion of your purchase will go towards supporting the Center's work.
HOW TO READ A DIFFICULT BOOK
American Maritain Association Publications Having Trouble Reading Difficult Books? Bad reading habits, not lack of intelligence, make many books difficult to read. This book gives a step-by-step guide to eliminate these bad habits. It can make almost anyone of average intelligence a better reader and learner. This book gives you tools to improve your:
Reading Peter Redpath is an internationally recognized scholar, lecturer, author, educational consultant, and teacher-trainer. He has taught thousands of students on the university level for over thirty years.
CONTENTS Acknowledgments Foreword Introduction Chapter 1 Learning, Tools, Books, and Philosophical Reading Chapter 2 The Skill of Philosophical Reading Chapter 3 General Kinds of Books and Kinds of Reading Chapter 4 Philosophical Reading and Definitions Chapter 5 Three Rules for "Philosophically Reading" any Book Chapter 6 A Book's General Outline Chapter 7 Philosophically Reading Theoretical Matters Chapter 8 Philosophically Reading Matters of Measurement Chapter 9 Philosophically Reading Practical Matters Chapter 10 Philosophically Reading Matters of Imaginable Experience Chapter 11 Philosophically Reading Mixed Matters Conclusion Questions for Study and Discussion Notes
FOREWORD No simple method exists to teach people how to read difficult books. Reading is a habit. We acquire habits by practice. For most of us, practice is difficult. For this reason alone, no simple way is likely to exist to teach us how to read difficult books. Generally, by difficult books we mean works that contain great truths, things that are usually hard for us to understand. For these reasons, I have written this work as a difficult book about how to read difficult books. While this work is difficult, I have made every effort to simplify its contents. Primarily, I have written this work for classroom use, with a teacher's help. But I have also organized it for use in seminar discussions and personal study. By dividing the book into sharply indicated, and usually short, sections, and by providing Questions for Study and Discussion at the back of the book, I have sought to make this work easy for classroom and seminar use. If it is used in the classroom, I suggest that the class work with it in the following way: (1) Read a short selection, either an entire short section, or part of a longer section, for about five to ten minutes. (2) After reading the section, with the teacher acting only as a moderator to direct questions, students should discuss among themselves their opinions about the meaning of what they have just read. (3) After students have discussed their opinions about the selection they have just read, the classroom teacher should select some questions for them to discuss from the corresponding section of the Questions for Study and Discussion. The Questions do not necessarily directly relate to what the students have read. This lack of direct relation between a reading section and the Questions for Study and Discussion is intentional, not a mistake in the text. In most cases, the Questions deal with other issues related to learning and reading. I give my own answers to some of these Questions in different parts of the text. I provide these Questions to encourage students to think about and discuss problems as independent learners and a community of inquiry, not to have them accept my views as unquestionable truths. Their answers might be better than mine. (4) As much as possible, readers should hunt for definitions and examples in each selection they read. They should try to use these definitions and examples when they try to answer Questions. (5) As students read, teachers should check their eye movement, and call their attention back to the text if their minds tend to wander off. To assist in this effort, readers should avoid wearing objects that obscure the classroom teacher's vision of their eye movement, like hats and sunglasses. (6) Readers should follow the text with some sort of marker in hand, such as a pen or pencil. (7) As much as possible, readers should outline sections after they read them and should try to summarize what they have just read. I wish all who read this book success in the pursuit of higher education. I hope they find this work useful in their quest. Peter A. Redpath
INTRODUCTION (excerpts) A. The State of Philosophical Reading: Yesterday and Today More than fifty years ago, Mortimer J. Adler, Chairman of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas, and one of the most respected educators of the twentieth century, wrote his best-selling work, "How to Read a Book." Within that best-seller, Adler made several startling statements. For example he said that, after he had left Columbia University, he discovered he could not read. Dr. Adler did not mean that he could not sound out, or understand the meaning of, the words used by the author of a text. He meant that he did not possess the ability to read skillfully, to understand the meaning of a book as a whole and grasp how its component parts comprised its makeup. He blamed his own poor reading ability on two main sources: (1) the curriculum of American schools which, he said, was "too crowded with other time-consuming things to permit enough attention to be given to the basic skills," and (2) "that most educators do not know how to teach the art of reading." He added that a main reason most educators lack the know-how to teach the art of reading is that the skills needed to teach this art "have been almost lost." What about English? Here, too, there is a record failure and defeat. Do pupils in school learn to read their mother tongue effectively? Yes and no. Up to the fifth and sixth grade, reading, on the whole, is effectively taught and well learned. To that level, we find a steady and general improvement, but beyond it the curves flatten out to a dead level. This is not because a person arrives at his natural limit of efficiency when he reaches the sixth grade, for it has been shown again and again that with special tuition much older children and also adults, can make enormous improvement. Nor does it mean that most sixth-graders read well enough for all practical purposes. A great many pupils do poorly in high school because of sheer ineptitude in getting meaning from the printed page. They can improve; but they don't. The average high-school graduate has done a great deal of reading, and if he goes on to college he will do a great deal more; but he is likely to be a poor and incompetent reader. (Note that this holds true of the average student, not a person who is a subject for special remedial treatment.) He can follow a simple piece of fiction and enjoy it. But put him up against a closely written exposition, a carefully and economically stated argument, or a passage requiring critical consideration, and he is at a loss. It has been shown, for instance, that the average high-school student is amazingly inept at indicating the central thought of a passage, or the levels of emphasis and subordination in an argument or exposition. To all intents and purposes he remains a sixth grade reader till well along in college. Adler maintained that, even after graduating from a university, the reading ability of American students around 1940 had not progressed much beyond a sixth grade level. To support this contention, Adler cited a New York State Board of Regents study of high school graduates that asserted that large numbers of them were "seriously deficient in the basic tools of learning" in such areas as the "ability to read" and to "understand straight-forward English." He followed this up with results reported by a Professor Dietrich, from the Department of Education, at a four day conference on reading held at the University of Chicago for teachers in 1939. Professor Dietrich's results were based upon "a test given at the University of Chicago to the best high-school seniors who came there from all parts of the country to compete for scholarships." Reportedly, he told the thousand teachers assembled "that most of these very 'able' students could not understand what they read." When Adler made these statements, he was among the most highly educated college graduates and educators in the United States. Yet he reported that, when he had graduated college, he did not know how to read skillfully. And neither did most Americans, including his university teaching colleagues. Adler's observations made over fifty years ago are worthy of reconsidering today for several reasons, one of which Adler gives: "If one could elaborate all the essentials which a sound educational programme must consider, I should say that the techniques of communication, which make for literacy, are our first obligation, and more so in a democracy than in any other kind of society, because it depends on a literate electorate. In a democracy, the people rule. No political society can long flourish or survive when the hands of power are held by illiterate rulers. The existence of such a condition, especially in a democracy, is intolerable." While Adler's observations are a sad indictment of the general incompetence of American educators, they should be a cause of hope for many American high school and college students who are constantly and continuously being criticized by many of these same educators for not being educationally motivated and for lacking educational skills. True, many American high school and college students are grossly illiterate. But, if such is the case, a main burden of responsibility for this state of affairs has to fall upon the shoulders of American educators, many of whom are also illiterate, and who are involved in attempting to communicate to their students a curriculum that students very often correctly recognize is filled with junk. Contemporary students should not be disheartened by much of the criticism that currently comes their way. The same criticism has been coming the way of American students for most of this century. Students of this generation are not less possessed of natural ability than were students in previous generations in this century. If anything they are simply a litte more illiterate than some students of the past. And a main reason for this is that even less demands have been made of them to learn to read skillfully than were made of students of previous generations. So, they have a little more catching up to do. Still, they have a greater number of more powerful resources available to them today to make up for lost time in their reading development, including this book.
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THE GREAT IDEAS
Dear Max, Mr. Mario Zoccoli's essay on God, and the replies to it have provoked me to write the following commentary. Mr. Zoccoli's essay involves claims about space, time, causality, man, mind, and God. However, it is ultimately about the possible relation of God to the physical universe. Surely, in such an undertaking initially something has to be said about the use of the word God. God is an x such that x is neither in space nor time, and x is the cause (in some sense) of the physical universe. This, I take it, is Mr. Zoccoli's working characterization of God. However, instead of explaining the sense of "cause" in which God is the cause of the physical universe, Mr. Zoccoli simply presents his version of what is called the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God. His version is this:
1. If that which is caused needs a cause, and He also holds implicit premises to the effect that (1a) A cause is temporally prior to the effect. (2a) Time exists only as a relation between events in the physical universe. So the premises are (1), (1a), (2), (2a), and (3); and the conclusion is (4). (1) and (3) can be granted as definitions. However, the conclusion does not follow from the premises. The first problem is that if causality involves time (by his definition 1a), then causality is limited to the physical universe (in which time applies, by 2a). However, in conclusion (4) he must be introducing some non-temporal sense of causality; so that the premise contains one sense of "causality" and the conclusion a different sense of "causality." So the argument as presented is invalid because of ambiguity (equivocation). The second problem with the argument is that it illicitly argues from claims about parts to a claim about the whole. Premise (2) can be rephrased as saying that for every x, if x is a member of P (the physical universe), then there is a y, which is also a member of P, and x is not identical to y, such that y is the cause of x. The conclusion (4), however, is that P (as a whole) is caused by Q, and Q is not identical to P. This line of reasoning is fallacious, and the fallacy has a name: the fallacy of composition. Andrew Chrucky
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