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= How_to_Read_a_Book =
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Introduction
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'How to Read a Book' is a book by the American philosopher Mortimer J.
Adler. Originally published in 1940, it was heavily revised for a 1972
edition, co-authored by Adler with editor Charles Van Doren. The 1972
revision gives guidelines for critically reading good and great books
of any tradition. In addition, it deals with genres (including, but
not limited to, poetry, history, science, and fiction), as well as
inspectional and syntopical reading.
Overview of the 1972 edition
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'How to Read a Book' is divided into four parts, each consisting of
several chapters.
Part 1: The Dimensions of Reading
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Here, Adler sets forth his method for reading a non-fiction book in
order to gain understanding. He claims that three distinct approaches,
or readings, must all be made in order to get the most possible out of
a book, but that performing these three levels of readings does not
necessarily mean reading the book three times, as the experienced
reader will be able to do all three in the course of reading the book
just once. Adler names the readings "structural", "interpretative",
and "critical", in that order.
'Structural stage': The first stage of analytical reading is concerned
with understanding the structure and purpose of the book. It begins
with determining the basic topic and type of the book being read, so
as to better anticipate the contents and comprehend the book from the
very beginning. Adler says that the reader must distinguish between
practical and theoretical books, as well as determining the field of
study that the book addresses. Further, Adler says that the reader
must note any divisions in the book, and that these are not restricted
to the divisions laid out in the table of contents. Lastly, the reader
must find out what problems the author is trying to solve.
'Interpretive stage': The second stage of analytical reading involves
constructing the author's arguments. This first requires the reader to
note and understand any special phrases and terms that the author
uses. Once that is done, Adler says that the reader should find and
work to understand each proposition that the author advances, as well
as the author's support for those propositions.
'Critical stage': In the third stage of analytical reading, Adler
directs the reader to critique the book. He asserts that upon
understanding the author's propositions and arguments, the reader has
been elevated to the author's level of understanding and is now able
(and obligated) to judge the book's merit and accuracy. Adler
advocates judging books based on the soundness of their arguments.
Adler says that one may not disagree with an argument unless one can
find fault in its reasoning, facts, or premises, though one is free to
dislike it in any case.
Part 2: The Third Level of Reading: Analytical Reading
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Adler explains for whom the book is intended, defines different
classes of reading, and tells which classes will be addressed. He also
makes a brief argument favoring the Great Books, and explains his
reasons for writing 'How to Read a Book'.
There are three types of knowledge: practical, informational, and
comprehensive. He discusses the methods of acquiring knowledge,
concluding that 1. practical knowledge, though teachable, cannot be
truly mastered without experience, 2. that only informational
knowledge can be gained by one whose understanding equals the
author's, and 3. that comprehension (insight) is best learned from the
person who first achieved said understanding - an "original
communication" with the source of understanding.
The idea that communication directly from those who first discovered
an idea is the best way of gaining understanding is Adler's argument
for reading the Great Books; that any book that does not represent
original communication is inferior, as a source, to the original, and
that any teacher, save those who discovered the subject he or she
teaches, is inferior to the Great Books as a source of comprehension.
Adler spends a good deal of this first section explaining why he was
compelled to write this book. He asserts that very few people can read
a book for understanding, but that he believes that most are capable
of it, given the right instruction and the will to do so. It is his
intent to provide that instruction. He takes time to tell the reader
about how he believes that the educational system has failed to teach
students the art of reading well, up to and including undergraduate,
university-level institutions. He concludes that, due to these
shortcomings in formal education, it falls upon individuals to
cultivate these abilities in themselves. Throughout this section, he
relates anecdotes and summaries of his experience in education as
support for these assertions.
Part 3: Approaches to Different Kinds of Reading Matter
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In this part, Adler briefly discusses the differences in approaching
various kinds of literature and suggests reading several other books.
He explains a method of approaching the Great Books - read the books
that influenced a given author prior to reading works by that author -
and gives several examples of that method.
Part 4: The Ultimate Goals of Reading
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The last part of the book covers the fourth level of reading:
syntopical reading. At this stage, the reader broadens and deepens his
or her knowledge on a given subjecte.g., love, war, particle physics,
etc.by reading several books on that subject. In the final pages of
this part, the author expounds on the philosophical benefits of
reading: "growth of the mind", fuller experience as a conscious
being...
Reading list (1972 edition)
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Appendix A in the 1972 edition provided the following recommended
reading list:
# Homer - 'Iliad', 'Odyssey'
# The Old Testament
# Aeschylus - Tragedies
# Sophocles - Tragedies
# Herodotus - 'Histories'
# Euripides - Tragedies
# Thucydides - 'History of the Peloponnesian War'
# Hippocrates - Medical Writings
# Aristophanes - Comedies
# Plato - Dialogues
# Aristotle - Works
# Epicurus - 'Letter to Herodotus'; 'Letter to Menoecus'
# Euclid - 'Elements'
# Archimedes - Works
# Apollonius of Perga - 'Conic Sections'
# Cicero - Works
# Lucretius - 'On the Nature of Things'
# Virgil - Works
# Horace - Works
# Livy - 'History of Rome'
# Ovid - Works
# Plutarch - 'Parallel Lives'; 'Moralia'
# Tacitus - 'Histories'; 'Annals'; 'Agricola'; 'Germania'
# Nicomachus of Gerasa - 'Introduction to Arithmetic'
# Epictetus - 'Discourses'; 'Encheiridion'
# Ptolemy - 'Almagest'
# Lucian - Works
# Marcus Aurelius - 'Meditations'
# Galen - 'On the Natural Faculties'
# The New Testament
# Plotinus - 'The Enneads'
# St. Augustine - "On the Teachers"; 'Confessions'; 'City of God'; 'On
Christian Doctrine'
# 'The Song of Roland'
# The 'Nibelungenlied'
# 'The Saga of Burnt Njál'
# St. Thomas Aquinas - 'Summa Theologica'
# Dante Alighieri - 'The Divine Comedy'; 'The New Life'; 'On Monarchy'
# Geoffrey Chaucer - 'Troilus and Criseyde'; 'The Canterbury Tales'
# Leonardo da Vinci - Notebooks
# Niccolò Machiavelli - 'The Prince'; 'Discourses on the First Ten
Books of Livy'
# Desiderius Erasmus - 'The Praise of Folly'
# Nicolaus Copernicus - 'On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres'
# Thomas More - 'Utopia'
# Martin Luther - Table Talk; Three Treatises
# François Rabelais - 'Gargantua and Pantagruel'
# John Calvin - 'Institutes of the Christian Religion'
# Michel de Montaigne - 'Essays'
# William Gilbert - 'On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies'
# Miguel de Cervantes - 'Don Quixote'
# Edmund Spenser - 'Prothalamion'; 'The Faerie Queene'
# Francis Bacon - 'Essays'; 'Advancement of Learning'; 'Novum
Organum', 'New Atlantis'
# William Shakespeare - 'Poetry and Plays'
# Galileo Galilei - 'Starry Messenger'; 'Dialogues Concerning Two New
Sciences'
# Johannes Kepler - 'Epitome of Copernican Astronomy'; 'Concerning the
Harmonies of the World'
# William Harvey - 'On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals';
'On the Circulation of the Blood'; 'On the Generation of Animals'
# Thomas Hobbes - 'Leviathan'
# René Descartes - 'Rules for the Direction of the Mind'; 'Discourse
on the Method'; 'Geometry'; 'Meditations on First Philosophy'
# John Milton - Works
# Molière - Comedies
# Blaise Pascal - 'The Provincial Letters'; 'Pensees'; Scientific
Treatises
# Christiaan Huygens - 'Treatise on Light'
# Benedict de Spinoza - 'Ethics'
# John Locke - 'Letter Concerning Toleration'; 'Of Civil Government';
'Essay Concerning Human Understanding'; 'Thoughts Concerning
Education'
# Jean Baptiste Racine - Tragedies
# Isaac Newton - 'Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy';
'Optics'
# Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - 'Discourse on Metaphysics'; 'New Essays
Concerning Human Understanding'; 'Monadology'
# Daniel Defoe - 'Robinson Crusoe'
# Jonathan Swift - 'A Tale of a Tub'; 'Journal to Stella'; 'Gulliver's
Travels'; 'A Modest Proposal'
# William Congreve - 'The Way of the World'
# George Berkeley - 'Principles of Human Knowledge'
# Alexander Pope - 'Essay on Criticism'; 'Rape of the Lock'; 'Essay on
Man'
# Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu - 'Persian Letters';
'Spirit of Laws'
# Voltaire - 'Letters on the English'; 'Candide'; 'Philosophical
Dictionary'; 'Micromegas'
# Henry Fielding - 'Joseph Andrews'; 'Tom Jones'
# Samuel Johnson - 'The Vanity of Human Wishes'; 'Dictionary';
'Rasselas'; 'The Lives of the Poets'
# David Hume - 'Treatise on Human Nature'; 'Essays Moral and
Political'; 'An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding'
# Jean-Jacques Rousseau - 'On the Origin of Inequality'; On the
Political Economy; 'Emile - or, On Education', 'The Social Contract'
# Laurence Sterne - 'Tristram Shandy'; 'A Sentimental Journey through
France and Italy'
# Adam Smith - 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments'; 'The Wealth of
Nations'
# Immanuel Kant - 'Critique of Pure Reason'; 'Fundamental Principles
of the Metaphysics of Morals'; 'Critique of Practical Reason'; 'The
Science of Right'; 'Critique of Judgment'; 'Perpetual Peace'
# Edward Gibbon - 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire';
Autobiography
# James Boswell - Journal; 'Life of Samuel Johnson', Ll.D.
# Antoine Laurent Lavoisier - 'Traité Élémentaire de Chimie' (Elements
of Chemistry)
# Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison - 'Federalist
Papers'
# Jeremy Bentham - An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation; Theory of Fictions
# Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - 'Faust'; 'Poetry and Truth'
# Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier - Analytical Theory of Heat
# Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - 'Phenomenology of Spirit';
'Philosophy of Right'; 'Lectures on the Philosophy of History'
# William Wordsworth - Poems
# Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Poems; 'Biographia Literaria'
# Jane Austen - 'Pride and Prejudice'; 'Emma'
# Carl von Clausewitz - 'On War'
# Stendhal - 'The Red and the Black'; 'The Charterhouse of Parma'; On
Love
# Lord Byron - 'Don Juan'
# Arthur Schopenhauer - Studies in Pessimism
# Michael Faraday - The Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental
Researches in Electricity
# Charles Lyell - 'Principles of Geology'
# Auguste Comte - The Positive Philosophy
# Honoré de Balzac - 'Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet'
# Ralph Waldo Emerson - Representative Men; Essays; Journal
# Nathaniel Hawthorne - 'The Scarlet Letter'
# Alexis de Tocqueville - 'Democracy in America'
# John Stuart Mill - 'A System of Logic'; 'On Liberty';
'Representative Government'; 'Utilitarianism'; 'The Subjection of
Women'; Autobiography
# Charles Darwin - 'The Origin of Species'; 'The Descent of Man';
'Autobiography'
# Charles Dickens - 'Pickwick Papers'; 'David Copperfield'; 'Hard
Times'
# Claude Bernard - 'Introduction to the Study of Experimental
Medicine'
# Henry David Thoreau - 'Civil Disobedience'; 'Walden'
# Karl Marx - 'Capital'; 'Communist Manifesto'
# George Eliot - 'Adam Bede'; 'Middlemarch'
# Herman Melville - 'Moby-Dick'; 'Billy Budd'
# Fyodor Dostoevsky - 'Crime and Punishment'; 'The Idiot'; 'The
Brothers Karamazov'
# Gustave Flaubert - 'Madame Bovary'; Three Stories
# Henrik Ibsen - Plays
# Leo Tolstoy - 'War and Peace'; 'Anna Karenina'; 'What is Art?';
Twenty-Three Tales
# Mark Twain - 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'; 'The Mysterious
Stranger'
# William James - 'The Principles of Psychology'; 'The Varieties of
Religious Experience'; 'Pragmatism'; 'Essays in Radical Empiricism'
# Henry James - 'The American'; 'The Ambassadors'
# Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'; 'Beyond Good
and Evil'; 'The Genealogy of Morals'; 'The Will to Power'
# Jules Henri Poincaré - 'Science and Hypothesis'; 'Science and
Method'
# Sigmund Freud - 'The Interpretation of Dreams'; Introductory
Lectures on Psychoanalysis; 'Civilization and Its Discontents'; New
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
# George Bernard Shaw - Plays and Prefaces
# Max Planck - Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is
Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
# Henri Bergson - 'Time and Free Will'; 'Matter and Memory'; 'Creative
Evolution'; 'The Two Sources of Morality and Religion'
# John Dewey - 'How We Think'; 'Democracy and Education'; 'Experience
and Nature'; 'Logic: the Theory of Inquiry'
# Alfred North Whitehead - 'An Introduction to Mathematics'; 'Science
and the Modern World'; 'The Aims of Education and Other Essays';
'Adventures of Ideas'
# George Santayana - 'The Life of Reason'; 'Skepticism and Animal
Faith'; Persons and Places
# Vladimir Lenin - 'The State and Revolution'
# Marcel Proust - 'Remembrance of Things Past'
# Bertrand Russell - 'The Problems of Philosophy'; The Analysis of
Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope
and Limits
# Thomas Mann - 'The Magic Mountain'; 'Joseph and His Brothers'
# Albert Einstein - The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of
Theoretical Physics; 'The Evolution of Physics'
# James Joyce - 'The Dead' in 'Dubliners'; A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man; 'Ulysses'
# Jacques Maritain - 'Art and Scholasticism'; 'The Degrees of
Knowledge'; 'The Rights of Man and Natural Law'; 'True Humanism'
# Franz Kafka - 'The Trial'; 'The Castle'
# Arnold J. Toynbee - 'A Study of History'; 'Civilization on Trial'
# Jean-Paul Sartre - 'Nausea'; 'No Exit'; 'Being and Nothingness'
# Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - 'The First Circle'; 'The Cancer Ward'
Publication data
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* Mortimer Adler,
[
https://archive.org/details/howtoreadabook1940edition 'How to Read a
Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education'], (1940)
** 1967 edition published with subtitle 'A Guide to Reading the Great
Books'
** 1972 revised edition, coauthor Charles Van Doren, New York: Simon
and Schuster.
See also
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* 'How to Read Literature Like a Professor' A book on literature
interpretation
* Reading (process)
License
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book
