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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





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Friday, May 1, 2015

I STAND IN AWE

This was posted, for some mysterious reason, on my other blog -- Formal Methods -- on April 11.  It was supposed to appear here:

Yesterday evening, Susie and I had dinner with David Reeve and his wife, Ina. David is a senior member of the UNC Philosophy Department who teaches Greek philosophy, among other things, and Ina has been sitting in on my Marx lectures. Susie and I got to the restaurant first, and when David and Ina arrived, he presented me with a thick paperback book with a brilliant red cover. It turned out to be a new translation of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics which David published very recently.

Now, I have the deeepest respect for those who read Plato and Aristotle in the original, but I stand in awe of anyone who has actually translated works of Plato or Aristotle. This morning I started reading David's long Introduction, which is fascinating and written without the slightest trace of jargon or faux scholarly showing off. I have already learned a great deal that I did not know [although that is, alas, faint praise indeed.]

If any of you are looking for a good summer read, I strongly recommend David's translation. The Ethics is of course on my list of twenty-six essential great works of Philosophy.

2 comments:

Acastos said...

Pet Peeve: the work is titled Nicomachean Ethics. Your spelling is a very common mistake.

Robert Paul Wolff said...

My mistake, not David Reeve's, needless to say.