The Classics

In many classes, particularly in the social sciences and philosophy, you are required to read classic works ranging from Aristotles to Adam Smith, from Machiavelli to Max Weber. You might ask yourself why. Surely, modern research has superceded these works. What have professors been doing for the past hundred years or more if we haven't gotten beyond these works. Don't we know more about philosophy than Aristotles, more about economics than Adam Smith, and so on. In any case, most of these works are hard to read - they use a different vocabulary, address questions that are no longer topical. If we must read them, why not updated versions that give the spirit of their arguments, but in modern terms and with modern relevance. In other words, good distillations.

The answers to these questions aren't obvious and are in fact controversial. Two bloggers have recently weighed on these issues from the pro-classics and anti-classics schools and their arguments are worth reading. The next time you are moaning or exulting over Plato or Hobbes in the original, check out their views in these two posts (pro and anti) and then bring them up in class.