I got home last night after the two-and-a-half-hour drive I make every weekend. The trip was rather uneventful -- unless you count my forgetting to pump my gas at the Shell on Illinois Rd. It was kind of the inverse of a drive-off, I suppose -- I pre-paid and then drove-off without my gas.Yeah. Embarassing.

Anyway, upon arriving at my weekend abode, I found four large boxes on my front porch (As well as a large manilla envelope hand-addressed to "Julian Forbes" -- but that's another story).

The long and short of it: They're here!!! I'm now the proud new owner of an old 54-volume set of The Great Books of the Western World, Britannica's compliation of Western classics. Thanks to Ebay, I got them at less than 1/3rd the price of brand new, with lots of bonus volumes including:

• 14 volumes of The Great Ideas Today: Kind of like a yearbook, with analysies of the classics in modern context, as well as additions to the series. They include such titles as "Science as Mystery: A Speculative Reading of Newton's Principia," "Kepler's Anguish and Hawking's Queries: Reflections on Natural Theology," "An Introduction to Buddhist Thought," a selection from Wu Ch'eng-en's Journey to the West, and John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.



• The 10-volume Gateway to the Great Books set: Anthogies of classical essays, organized by field.



• The 10-volume Great Ideas Program: A reading guide for the Great Books providing an outline for a "liberal education" and analysis/context to enrich the experience.

Granted, it's an old set -- all the copyrights are from the late 50's/early 60's (Save, of course, The Great Ideas Today, which go as lete as 1998). Given that most of these works are hundreds or thousands of years old, however, archaic publication isn't and issue. Old looks good on a shelf, too, even if the analysis articles (Like those in The Great Ideas Program) are outdated by half a century.

This is like candy for me. I'm already browsing Book III of Principia Mathematica, specifically the part where he applies his model of gravity to tides, showing the effects of the Sun and the Moon on water levels. Isn't it awesome that we could do that 350 years ago?

And yes, Benedicts, I've perused Spinoza's Ethics. I'm intrigued by the proposition-demonstration format he uses -- I'd heard before of that approach to philosophical writing, but had never actually seen it.

Aristotle's explanation of the Rainbow in Book III of Meteorology is amazing, though clearly somewhat lacking as far as insight into optics is concerned. Without his early (And not half-bad) attempt at explaining things, though, I suppose we may never have gotten to the Optics of Newton et al.

SigmaX