“Who edited L’Encyclopedie? Denis Diderot (17013-84), French philosopher. This compendium of knowledge was published in thirty-five volumes between 1751 and 1776. It was meant to cover all aspects of life and embodied the rationalistic ideals of the Enlightenment. Contributers included Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Here is a reading on Euclid along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. This is, as so many of the readings from the Intellectual Devotional series tend to be, a nice one-page conspectus on the author of The Elements, and the influences that led to the creation of this, essentially the world’s first first geometry textbook–which is, unsurprisingly, available across the internet in a variety of PDFs. The first one that pops up (under that hyperlink) is from a physicist named Richard Fitzpatrick at the University of Texas; it’s free of advertising clutter and, to the extent of my limited knowledge of the subject, well organized.
Also, in researching this post, I learned that the first of the five volumes in the Intellectual Devotional series is available as a free e-book under that hyperlink (at least at the time of this post’s publication), should you be interested.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
“Unobstructed access to facts can produce unlimited good only if it is matched by the desire and ability to find out what they mean and where they lead.”
Norman Cousins “Freedom as Teacher” (1981)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled, and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
“John Rawls: (1921-2002) U.S. philosopher. Born in Baltimore, he taught at Cornell (1962-79) and later Harvard (from 1979). He has written primarily on ethics and political philosophy. In his Theory of Justice (1971), he offered an alternative to utilitarianism that led to very different conclusions about justice. He asserted that if people had to choose principles of justice from behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ that restricted what they could know about their own position in society, they would not seek to maximize overall utility but would instead both protect their liberty and safeguard themselves against the worst possible outcome, They would thus sanction only the kinds of inequalities (e.g. in wealth) that are to the benefit of the worst off (e.g. because the inequalities are necessary for incentives that benefit all).”
Excerpted/Adapted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
Here is a reading on pragmatism and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I don’t imagine there will be a lot of demand for these documents; I wrote them for one student about 15 years ago. Preparing them for this post was the first time I’ve looked at them since then.
It’s probably worth mentioning that pragmatism is form of philosophy born in the United States. Its parents, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), William James (1842-1910), and John Dewey (1859-1952), are given first-class treatment in Louis Menand’s book on them and their philosophy, The Metaphysical Club (2001).
Aside: last summer, I spent some time interviewing for jobs in Albany, New York and environs, known as the Capital District or the Capital Region; I saw signs directing me to the village of Menands, seven miles north of Albany. As someone interested in place names and their origins, I assumed that the town was named for Louis Menand’s family. As it turns out, Louis Menand’s great-grandfather, also named Louis Menand, and himself an important 19th-century horticulturist, first arrived in the Village in 1842. So yes, once again, an old American family’s name becomes a place name, as so many have–think of the Astors: If you happen to live in New York City, their name is all over the place.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Ideology:Tendentious arguments which advance a world view as absolute truth in order to win and hold political power.
A god who intervenes in human affairs through spokesmen who generally call themselves priests; a king who implements instructions received from God; a predestined class war which requires the representatives of a certain class to take power; a corporatist structure of experts who implement truth through fact-based conclusions; a racial unit which because of its blood ties has a destiny as revealed by nationalist leaders; a world market which, whether anyone likes it or not, will determine the shape of every human life, as interpreted by corporate executives—all of these and more are ideologies.
Followers are caught up in the naïve obsessions of these movements. This combination ensures failure and is prone to violence. That’s why the decent intentions of the Communist Manifesto end up in gulags and murder. Or the market-place’s promise of prosperity in the exploitation of cheap, often child, labor.
There are big ideologies and little ones. They come in international, national, and local shapes. Some require skyscrapers, others circumcision. Like fiction they are dependent on the willing suspension of disbelief, because God only appears in private and before his official spokespeople, class leaders themselves decide the content and pecking order of classes, experts choose their facts judiciously, blood-ties aren’t pure and the passive acceptance of a determinist market means denying 2,500 years of Western civilization from Athens and Rome through the Renaissance to the creation of middle-class democracies.
Which is ideology/ Which not? You shall know them my their assertion of truth, their contempt for considered reflection and their fear of debate.
Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
They’re very likely something nobody at the elementary or secondary level needs, but here nonetheless are a reading on postmodernism and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. The one-page reading does a nice job of explaining what, for me, has always been a slippery concept. So if you’re teaching some or any of the authors discussed in this reading–among others you’ll find Thomas Pynchon, Italo Calvino, Toni Morrison, and Jean Rhys mentioned here–these documents probably aren’t of, uh, surpassing use to you.
On the other hand, as the reading points out, postmodernism is “notoriously difficult to define, whether in reference to literature, art, or anything else….” So there is the question of semantics to entertain here; a point of debate might be “Is there a stable definition of ‘postmodernism’ with concrete applied examples of the word?” Another might be an assertion in the reading, mostly accurate in my understanding of postmodernism, that the doctrine (such as it is) prescribes a view of the world that that “secure truths [do] not exist and that the world was therefore hopelessly fragmented.” That’s a grim assessment in many respects; but how, if at all, has it lent credibility to and generally abetted tyrants around the globe who began almost immediately, after a former president of the United States began flogging the term, began proclaiming most journalism (or journalism that doesn’t flatter the supreme leader) “fake news”? There, I think, is another point for debate.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Social Sciences, Worksheets
Tagged building vocabulary/conceptual knowledge, cognition/learning/understanding, diction/grammar/style/usage, drama/theater, fiction/literature, literary oddities, philosophy/religion, questioning/inquiry, readings/research
OK, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Bacchus. He is, as my late, great friend Fritz Hewitt once said, “the god of rave-up.” If you prefer, the reading in this worksheet puts it, a bit more academically: Bacchus is the “Greek and Roman god of wine and revelry.” This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of five sentences–all short–and three comprehension questions. Even a reading this short, from The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, hits all the bases, including associating Bacchus with Dionysus, which is useful.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
 | A Measurement Conver… on An Elegantly Simple Cooking Co… |
| A Measurement Conver… on The Weekly Text, October 25, 2… |
 | markstextterminal on Cree |
 | panzer046a139293db on Cree |
| markstextterminal on Cree |
Mark's Text Terminal 
You must be logged in to post a comment.