This blog is a Paper Project for the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University.
Each semester Torrey students are required to do either a paper or a paper project. This is my eighth and final semester in Torrey, and I thought it was time I did a project. Over the years, I’ve read some of the most important books to western thought. This blog is a sort of memorial to all those books I’ve read over the years. Though I won’t cover all the books, I hope to hit as many as I can within the limits of the paper project (and possibly more afterwards if I’m inclined).
The posts in this blog are to show an connection between the texts. How does Homer connect with our Christian lives? Why does Justin Martyr think Plato is in heaven? How do we see Marx affect our business models? The possibilities of this blog are endless, though there are some constrictions. Each post will use a Torrey text as a major source, excluding the Bible (though it may come up in many posts). You can check out my official paper proposal by downloading it below.
If you have any ideas of which text and topics to write on, or if you would like to see me write on something, leave a comment on this page.
Torrey Book Blog 
It is a nice project, but “the most important books to western thought” might be limiting to someone as creative as you, stretch out, follow the foot notes. There are many many books which are the cause for the effect. Nietzsche, in The Gay Science states ”
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Cause and Effect. We say it is “explanation “; but it is only in “description” that we are in advance of the older stages of knowledge and science. We describe better, we explain just as little as our predecessors. We have discovered a manifold succession where the naive man and investigator of older cultures saw only two things, “cause” and “effect,”as it was said; we have perfected the conception of becoming, but have not got a knowledge of what is above and behind the conception. The series of “causes” stands before us much more complete in every case; we conclude that this and that must first precede in order that that other may follow – but we have not grasped anything thereby. The peculiarity, for example, in every chemical process seems a “miracle,” the same as before, just like all locomotion; nobody has “explained” impulse. How could we ever explain? We operate only with things which do not exist, with lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible times, divisible spaces – how can explanation ever be possible when we first make everything a conception, our conception? It is sufficient to regard science as the exactest humanizing of things that is possible; we always learn to describe ourselves more accurately by describing things and their successions. Cause and effect: there is probably never any such duality; in fact there is a continuum before us, from which we isolate a few portions – just as we always observe a motion as isolated points, and therefore do not properly see it, but infer it. The abruptness with which many effects take place leads us into error; it is however only an abruptness for us. There is an infinite multitude of processes in that abrupt moment which escape us. An intellect which could see cause and effect as a continuum, which could see the flux of events not according to our mode of perception, as things arbitrarily separated and broken – would throw aside the conception of cause and effect, and would deny all conditionality.” I quote this because it exhibits the (early modern to Modern& Present) western bias on the legitimized Great and Important. As Meister Eckhart preaches “from his little finger” he places Doctrine and Dogma in the hole that it is. In this respect you might want to spend some time with Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes ( the J.B. Baillie translation is closet to the german than the Harris by my point of view)
Hello James,
Thank you for taking time to check out my blog and for your thoughts. I focused on the Western Classics because those are the books in the program I am in right now. I did this blog as a project for the program and plan to continue it for future students in the program (though I have another blog that I occasionally use for interacting with other texts).
What I hear you saying is that Nietzsche believes that having great books or moments makes us see the world as segmented moments with causes and effects instead as one continuous string of events. By highlighting books as important, we are fragmenting the cause and effect. I guess my question is, do we need to view everything as one continuum with no cause and effects? While everything is ultimately connected, I think we can view and should see causes and effects. As humans who exist in cause and effect, in finiteness, I think seeing the Great and Important is helpful in grasping the whole, or to ‘infer’ the whole.
I’m not quiet sure what Meister Eckhart’s point is. Is he saying that doctrine and dogma are small? What is there place according to him?