A World of Ideas

1032 Pages·10·7.027 MB·English

by  Lee A Jacobus

What are you working on? This page tells you where to find help with
critical reading and writing in A World of Ideas.
NEED HELP WITH CRITICAL READING?
Learn strategies for critical reading—including prereading,
annotating, questioning, reviewing, discussing, and forming ideas—
on pages 2–10.
See a sample annotated passage on pages 5–7.
NEED HELP GETTING STARTED WITH YOUR WRITING?
Get ideas for generating topics for writing on pages 11–15.
NEED HELP CREATING AN ARGUMENT?
Find approaches for establishing your argument on pages 41–44.
Learn about Classical, Toulmin, and Rogerian arguments on pages
42–44.
NEED HELP DEVELOPING YOUR ARGUMENT?
Learn strategies for creating a thesis statement on pages 22–27.
Learn about methods of developing your argument and supporting
your thesis on pages 27–44.
Read sample opening paragraphs using different methods of
development on pages 30, 32, 34, 36, and 38.
WANT TO SEE A SAMPLE STUDENT ESSAY?
Read a sample student essay about Niccolò Machiavelli’s “The
Qualities of the Prince” on pages 44–47.
NEED TO FIND A SPECIFIC TERM OR AUTHOR?
Go to the Index of Rhetorical Terms on pages 821–823.
You will also find an alphabetical list of authors on the last page of
this book.
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TENTH EDITION
A World of Ideas
ESSENTIAL READINGS FOR COLLEGE
WRITERS
LEE A. JACOBUS
University of Connecticut
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For Bedford/St. Martin’s
Vice President, Editorial, Macmillan Learning Humanities: Edwin Hill
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Writing: Leasa Burton
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Text Design: Laura Shaw Design, Inc.
Cover Design: William Boardman
Cover Art/Cover Photo: Villa Farnese (Palazzo Farnese), by Barozzi Jacopo
known as Vignola, 1550–1559, 16th Century / Villa Farnese, Caprarola, Lazio,
Italy / Mondadori Portfolio / Electa / Andrea Jemolo / Bridgeman Images
Composition: Jouve
Printing and Binding: LSC Communications
Copyright © 2017, 2013, 2010, 2006 by Bedford/St. Martin’s.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except as may be expressly permitted by
the applicable copyright statutes or in writing by the Publisher.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
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For information, write: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 75 Arlington Street, Boston, MA
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ISBN 978-1-319-07762-4
Acknowledgments
Text acknowledgments and copyrights appear at the back of the book on pages
818–20, which constitute an extension of the copyright page. Art acknowledgments
and copyrights appear on the same page as the art selections they cover.
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Preface
Among the pleasures of editing A World of Ideas are the discussions I have
had over the years with students and teachers who have used the book in
their writing classes. A student once wrote to tell me that the book meant a
great deal to her and that her experience with it impelled her to wonder
what originally inspired me to assemble the first edition. I explained that
my teaching of first-year writing has always inclined toward ideas that
serious writers and thinkers have explored and contemplated throughout
the ages; early on, I could not find a composition reader that introduced
students to the important thinkers whose writing I believe should be basic
to everyone’s education. As a result of that need, A World of Ideas took
shape and has continued to grow and develop through ten editions,
attracting a wide audience of teachers and students who value the thought-
provoking ideas that affect the way we interpret the world.
In preparing the tenth edition of A World of Ideas, I have benefited, as
usual, from the suggestions of hundreds of users of earlier editions. The
primary concern of both teachers and students is that the book remain
centered on the tradition of important ideas and on the writers whose work
has had a lasting influence on society. To that end, I have chosen writers
whose ideas are central to our most important and lasting concerns. A new
edition offers the opportunity to reevaluate old choices and make new ones
that expand and deepen what has always been the fundamental purpose of
this composition reader: to provide college students in first-year writing
courses with a representative sampling of important ideas examined by
men and women who have shaped the way we think today.
The selections in this volume are of the highest quality. Each was
chosen because it clarifies important ideas and can sustain discussion and
stimulate good writing. Unlike most composition readers, A World of Ideas
presents substantial excerpts from the work of each of its authors. The
selections are presented as they originally appeared; very rarely are they
edited and marked with ellipses. They average fifteen pages in length, and
their arguments are presented completely, as the authors wrote them.
Developing a serious idea in writing takes time and a willingness to
experiment. Most students are willing to read deeply into the work of
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important thinkers to grasp their ideas better because the knowledge
yielded by the effort is vast and rewarding.
A Text for Readers and Writers
Because students perceive writers such as Plato and Thoreau as serious
and important, they take more seriously the writing course that uses texts
by these authors: such students learn to read more attentively, think more
critically, and write more effectively. But more important, this may be a
student’s only opportunity to encounter the thinkers whose ideas have
shaped civilization. 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.
CLASSIC READINGS. A World of Ideas draws its forty-nine
selections from the writing of some of the world’s most important thinkers.
Among them are Hannah Arendt, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Andrew
Carnegie, Charles Darwin, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Sigmund Freud, Howard Gardner, Thomas Jefferson, Carl Jung, Martin
Luther King Jr., Hsün Tzu, Niccolò Machiavelli, Karl Marx, Margaret
Mead, Philip Kitcher, Michio Kaku, Iris Murdoch, Friedrich Nietzsche,
Robert B. Reich, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jacob Riis, F. A. Hayek, Francis
Fukuyama, Lisa Randall, Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Eric Kandell,
Kwame Appiah, and Virginia Woolf.
A FOCUS ON SIX GREAT IDEAS. The unique structure of A World
of Ideas highlights seminal ideas as developed by great thinkers
throughout history and facilitates cross-disciplinary comparisons. Each of
the six parts of the book focuses on one great idea — Government,
Culture, Wealth, Mind, Science, and Ethics. Part introductions ground
students in the history of each idea and connect the philosophies of
individual writers and offer questions prompting students to consider their
own assumptions about each idea before they begin reading the selections.
“Evaluating Ideas: An Introduction to Critical Reading.” This
introduction demonstrates a range of methods students can adopt to
participate in a meaningful dialogue with each selection. This dialogue —
an active, questioning approach to texts and ideas — is one of the keys to
critical reading. In the introduction, a portion of Machiavelli’s “The
Qualities of the Prince” is annotated to help students follow the key ideas
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of the piece and to model for students a critical reading process that they
can adapt to other essays in the book. The introduction encourages
students to mark what they think are the most interesting and important
ideas in an essay and highlight or underline all sentences that they might
want to quote in an essay of their own.
“Writing about Ideas: An Introduction to Rhetoric.” In the tenth
edition, this section, which now immediately follows “Evaluating Ideas:
An Introduction to Critical Reading,” has been much expanded, with an
emphasis on developing thesis statements, using rhetorical methods of
development, and thinking critically to construct a strong argument. Many
new examples based on current selections in the tenth edition help students
find fruitful approaches to the material. This section explains how a reader
can make annotations while reading critically and then use those
annotations to write effectively in response to the ideas presented in any
selection in the book. “Writing about Ideas” draws on the annotations of
the Machiavelli selection illustrated in “Evaluating Ideas: An Introduction
to Critical Reading.” A sample student essay on Machiavelli, using the
techniques taught in the context of reading and writing, gives students a
model for moving from a critical response to a selection to writing their
own material. In addition, this section helps students understand how they
can apply some of the basic rhetorical principles discussed throughout the
book.
SELECTION HEADNOTES. Each selection is preceded by a detailed
headnote on the author’s life and work and by comments about the primary
ideas presented in the reading. The rhetorical techniques of the author are
described in some detail with a careful emphasis on the kinds of
techniques that students themselves can use. The discussion of the author’s
rhetoric is usually keyed to the rhetorical skills introduced in Writing
about Ideas. One emphasis is on examining how an author’s rhetorical
techniques can achieve specific effects.
PREREADING QUESTIONS. To emphasize critical thinking, reading,
and writing, prereading questions precede every selection. The content of
the selections is challenging, and these prereading questions can help
students in first-year writing courses overcome minor difficulties in
understanding the author’s meaning. These brief questions are designed to
help students focus on central issues during their first reading of each
selection.
EXTENSIVE APPARATUS. At the end of each selection is a group of
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discussion questions designed for use inside or outside the classroom.
Questions for Critical Reading focus on key issues and ideas and can be
used to stimulate general class discussion and critical thinking.
Suggestions for Critical Writing help students practice some of the
rhetorical strategies employed by the author of a given selection. These
suggestions ask for personal responses, as well as complete essays that
involve research. A number of these assignments, labeled “Connections,”
promote critical reading by requiring students to connect particular
passages in a selection with a selection by another writer, either in the
same part of the book or in another part. The variety of connections is
intriguing — Lao-tzu with Machiavelli, Aristotle with Andrew Carnegie,
Adam Smith with Thomas Jefferson, F. A. Hayek with John Maynard
Keynes, Francis Bacon with Howard Gardner, Kwame Anthony Appiah
with Iris Murdoch and Michael Gazzaniga, Judith Butler with Margaret
Mead, Gilbert Ryle with Eric Kandel, Hsün Tzu with Aristotle, and many
more.
In this edition, I ask a number of questions in each of the six sections
of the book before the student reads any of the essays. This helps give
them a baseline for their own thoughts about government, culture, wealth,
mind, science, and ethics before they begin examining those ideas. Then, I
provide a number of follow-up questions at the end of each section to help
students see how much they have absorbed from the authors they have
studied.
INSTRUCTOR’S RESOURCE MANUAL. I have prepared an
extensive manual, Resources for Teaching A WORLD OF IDEAS, that
contains further background on the selections, examples from my own
classroom responses to the selections, and more suggestions for classroom
discussion and student writing assignments. Sentence outlines for the
selections — which have been carefully prepared by Michael Hennessy,
Carol Verberg, Ellen Troutman, Ellen Darion, and Jon Marc Smith — can
be photocopied or downloaded from the Instructor Resources tab on the
book’s catalog page at macmillanlearning.com and given to students. The
idea for these sentence outlines came from the phrase outlines that Darwin
created to precede each chapter of On the Origin of Species. These outlines
may be used to discuss the more difficult selections and to provide
additional guidance for students. At the end of the manual, brief
bibliographies are provided for all forty-eight authors. These
bibliographies may be photocopied or downloaded and distributed to
students who wish to explore the primary selections in greater depth.
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New in the Tenth Edition
The tenth edition offers a number of new features to help students engage
and interact with the texts as they learn to analyze ideas and develop their
own thoughts in writing.
NEW ESSENTIAL READINGS. The selections in A World of Ideas
explore the key ideas that have defined the human experience and shaped
civilization. Of the forty-nine selections, twenty-two are new to this
edition, including works by Aristotle, Milton and Rose Friedman, Hsün
Tzu, Ralph Waldo Emerson, F. A. Hayek, Jacob Riis, John Maynard
Keynes, Francis Fukuyama, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karen Horney, John
Rawls, Gilbert Ryle, Robert Nozick, Erik Kandel, Howard Gardner,
Richard Feynman, Edward O. Wilson, Michio Kaku, Philip Kitcher, Lisa
Randall, Hsün Tzu, and Carol Gilligan.
REORGANIZED FOUNDATIONAL IDEAS. The selections in the
six sections — Government, Culture, Wealth, Mind, Science, and Ethics
— cover considerable historical periods and attitudes toward their subjects.
All six sections contain ideas that affect every one of us in a number of
important ways.
Government, with an emphasis on democracy, for example, is, as Aristotle
and Plato both knew, in many respects one of the most important ideas of
modern times (which is why the book starts with it).
Culture includes a number of social issues: gender studies, issues of justice,
prejudice, and a range of historical perspectives that affect all of us.
Wealth centers on the history of economics and how people have interpreted
the effects of money on society. In a society facing massive inequalities, it
helps to understand how important thinkers square the stress that great wealth
has put upon democratic governments.
Mind introduces several important issues: the question of the unconscious and
its effect on our lives; the mind-body problem, which has an effect on faith; and
the question of how a physical body can produce consciousness. I also
introduce basic ideas in classical psychology.
Science focuses more on the scientific way of thinking than on specific details.
Darwin’s ideas about evolution and Newtonian and Einsteinian theories of
gravity stand next to a major modern concern: how our understanding of
genetics will ultimately change the genes of human beings.
Finally, Ethics appropriately follows the first five sections because the behavior
of government, cultural forces, economists, brain and mind studies, and
scientific upheavals all must be governed by the best understanding of ethical
principles that will avoid injustice and oppression.
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