A World of Ideas: Essential Readings for College Writers

The most successful reader of its kind,A World of Ideasintroduces first-year writing students to the thinkers and writers whose ideas have shaped civilization: for example, Niccolo Machiavelli on government, Elizabeth Cady Stanton on justice, and Sigmund Freud on the mind. Because students perceive these writers as important, they take the writing course seriously: they learn to read more attentively, think more critically, and write more effectively. No other composition reader offers a comparable collection of important readings along with the supportive apparatus students need to understand, analyze, and respond to them.

Preface

To the Student

Evaluating Ideas: An Introduction to Critical Reading

 

PART ONE: GOVERNMENT

new VISUALIZING GOVERNMENT: Eugéne Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People [Image]

Lao-Tzu, Thoughts from the Tao-te Ching

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Qualities of the Prince

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Origin of Civil Society

Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence

new José Ortega y Gasset, The Greatest Danger, the State

new Carl Becker, Ideal Democracy

Hannah Arendt, Total Domination

 

PART TWO: JUSTICE

new VISUALIZING JUSTICE: Luca Giordano, The Triumph of Justice [Image]

Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Defense of Injustice

Frederick Douglass, from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and American Slave

Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions

Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice

 

new PART THREE: THE INDIVIDUAL

new VISUALIZING THE INDIVIDUAL: Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog [Image]

new Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

new Emile Durkheim, The Individual and the Intellectuals

new W.E.B. DuBois, Of Our Spiritual Strivings

newRuth Benedict, The Individual and the Pattern of Culture

new Erich Fromm, The Individual in the Chains of Illusion

 

PART IV: WEALTH AND POVERTY

new VISUALIZING WEALTH AND POVERTY: Henry Osawa Tanner, The Thankful Poor [Image]

Adam Smith, Of the Natural Progress of Opulence

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

new Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Position of Poverty

Robert B. Reich, Why the Rich are Getting Richer and the Poor, Poorer

 

PART V: MIND

new VISUALIZING THE MIND: Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory [Image]

Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

new René Descartes, Fourth Meditation: Of Truth and Error

Sigmund Freud, The Oedipus Complex

Carl Jung, The Personal and Collective Unconscious

Howard Gardner, A Rounded Version: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences

new Steven Pinker, Thinking Machines

new V.S. Ramachandran, Neuroscience¾ The New Philosophy

PART VI: NATURE

new VISUALIZING NATURE: Asher Durand, Kindred Spirits [Image]

Francis Bacon, The Four Idols

Charles Darwin, Natural Selection

Rachel Carson, The Sunless Sea

Stephen Jay Gould, Nonmoral Nature

Michio Kaku, The Mystery of Dark Matter

new Francis Fukuyama, Genetic Engineering

 

PART VII: ETHICS AND MORALITY

new VISUALIZING ETHICS AND MORALITY: Joseph Wright, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump [Image]

Aristotle, The Aim of Man

Friedrich Nietzsche, Morality as Anti-Nature

Iris Murdoch, Morality and Religion

new Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethic

new Peter Singer & Jim Mason, The Ethics of Eating Meat

 

new PART VIII: GENDER AND CULTURE

new VISUALIZING GENDER AND CULTURE: Mary Cassatt, In the Loge [Image]

Mary Wollstonecraft, Pernicious Effects Which Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society

new John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women

Virgina Woolf, Shakespeare’s Sister

new Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament

new Claude Lévi-Strauss, Men, Women, and Chiefs

new Germaine Greer, Masculinity

WRITING ABOUT IDEAS: An Introduction to Rhetoric

INDEX OF RHETORICAL TERMS