Bell Books

This is one of the best Bobbsey Twins books I have read. Once I started reading it, I just couldn't put it down. The Bobbsey Twins are going on a field trip. But they get mixed up in a mystery again. It is very exciting.

Why this is no longer the standard is a shame for the world-who need plato now more than ever. Bohn's classical translation is still the greatest of all time in the English language. Modern translations only push their agendas based on modern interpretations of Plato's philosophy.

Pausanias' two volume travel logs, which were written in the second century A.D., are the most comprehensive sources of data about ancient Greece. Pausanias travels throughout Greece in a linear fashion, describing the historical artifacts he sees and he make thousands of comments about the people and events associated with the artifacts. Most of this information has been lost and is only available in Pausanias' works.

It is particullarily enlightening to use Google Earth to follow in the footsteps of Pausanias and see the terrain he describes, and see how the terrain affected the events involved, the battles, and the interactions between the various peoples.

These works provide an overview of Greek history, and should be the starting point from which to focus in on specific people and events. The works are not so much entertaining and specific, but they provide a wealth of information that is not available anywhere else.

I read this book for a graduate class in history. Hegel's philosophy of history is perhaps the most fully developed philosophical theory of history that attempts to discover meaning or direction in history. Hegel incorporates a deeper historicism into his philosophical theories than his predecessors or successors. According to Hegel, the events whose story is told by political and legal history can be given a philosophical interpretation that will bring out its philosophical meaning. He does this himself in his lectures on the Philosophy of History. He views it to be a central task for philosophy to comprehend its place in the unfolding of history. History is for Hegel the development of Freedom, or rather, of the consciousness of Freedom. History is the process by which Spirit becomes conscious of itself. Individual thinkers, artists, and historical actors are primarily the means or instruments by which the collective spirit (God in the world) becomes conscious of truth.

Hegel constructs world history into a narrative of stages of human freedom, from the public freedom of the polis and the citizenship of the Roman Republic, to the individual freedom of the Protestant Reformation, to the civic freedom of the modern state. He attempts to incorporate the civilizations of India and China into his understanding of world history, though he regards those civilizations as static and therefore pre-historical. He constructs specific moments as "world-historical" events that were in the process of bringing about the final, full stage of history and human freedom. For example, Napoleon's conquest of much of Europe is portrayed as a world-historical event doing history's work by establishing the terms of the rational bureaucratic state. Hegel finds reason in history; but it is a latent reason, and one that can only be comprehended when the fullness of history's work is finished.

Many in Western Europe saw Europe or the Western European nations as the pinnacle of historical development, poised to carry their mission civilisatrice to Asia, Africa, Oceania. Yes, they could say, ancient civilizations had contributed to the eventual emergence of modern European civilization, but Europe had integrated what was valuable in those ancient insights into a higher form and it could now turn around and offer this higher form of culture to the rest of humanity who had remained "backward" and "underdeveloped." Hegel has very little to say about the New World. He acknowledges that the Native Americans have been overtaken by Europeans, thus the New World is a continuation of the Old World in its civilization and culture. He sees history progressing in America (populated by Englishmen), but finds that it has not matured yet. He sees America as a growing, prosperous, and industrious nation with a population that is a federation of people who love freedom. However, the nation is not politically fixed yet and he thinks, "a real state and a real government will arise only after a distinction of classes has arisen, when wealth and poverty become extreme." However, this can't happen as long as America has vast territory for people to expand and populate, he thinks these changes can't come about until America is as crowded as Europe so that people agitate each other and clamor for change. I think Hegel foresaw the Civil War. I think the America he ultimately envisioned is finally here today. Our country seems to be equally divided politically and I am not sure our present political institutions can hold us together.

Hegel once described Napoleon, whom he observed in the flesh just before or after one of Napoleon's major victories, as "the world spirit on horseback." Napoleon at that time was a major expression of the dynamic process which was transforming Europe in a certain direction. When Napoleon had served his purpose, he was discarded by the World Spirit, which then adopted other political leaders as its means.

It is worth observing that Hegel's philosophy of history is not the caricature of speculative philosophical reasoning that analytic philosophers sometimes paint it. His philosophical approach is not based solely on foundational a priori reasoning. Instead he proposes an "immanent" encounter between philosophical reason and the historical given. His prescription is that the philosopher should seek to discover the rational within the real--not to impose the rational upon the real. "To comprehend what is, this is the task of philosophy, because what is, is reason." Hegel's approach is neither purely philosophical nor purely empirical; instead, he undertakes to discover within the best historical knowledge of his time, an underlying rational principle that can be philosophically articulated.

Recommended reading for anyone interested in philosophy, political science, and history.

This book is based on the lecture notes taken by a Mr. Collier who attended the series of talks given by Coleridge in 1811-1812 at the London Philosophical Society .Coleridge was forty years of age at the time. The lectures open with a general one on the principles of poetry and are largely devoted to Shakespeare but there are a few on Milton.
Coleridge is one of English Literature's greatest Shakepeare critics. Coleridge was as a critic primarily interested in the creative process, and saw Shakespeare as the maker of great organic works, the Master of the Imagination ( and not of the mechanical Fancy). Coleridge's Hamlet criticism is one of the milestones in understanding the delay of Hamlet in executing his task. Above all this is a work of one great creative figure appreciating two other giants in the English Literary tradition.

I read this book many years ago and like it so much that I now include it in the "reference library" I am making in my Kindle. Too bad Machiavelli's reputation is so much established by The Prince. The History of Florence and The Discourses on Livy clearly show Machiavelli was not all that Machiavellian.

Byron once claimed that his own sense of tragedy was dreived from Alfieri. Say no more. This brilliant soul, like Kleist, Racine, Buchner, Lenz, Holderlin, Corneille and many others: they've been relegated to the attics and cobwebs of their own nationalities and the endless, tendentious posturing of localized academe. Boxed up. Locked away. In a trunk with FOR PROFESSORS AND GRAD STUDENTS ONLY!!! scrawled large upon the surface...

This is sad- this man's work's especialy 'Saul' and 'Mirra' are bursting with a sense of the tragic not often utilized, epsecially in this day and age where every goddam, sappy Oscar-winning film has to have some kind of pseudo-happy-ending/idiotic life affirming moral tacked on so as to conform with flinching audience's expectations and testing results. No one wants and honest and unflinching depiction of life and the pain of being human.

However! For those with the might of soul needed to confront great literature, Alfieri is up there. Way the hell up there. One can definitely see the influence on Byron in terms of both style (condensed/perfected neo-classicism- despite his 'Romantic,' tagline, Byron looked down sneeringly on his contemporaries who succumbed to the many execrable urges of the Romantic movement, his style was far too precise to be Romantic, and both he & Goethe both shared a triumph of style over their Romantic roots, also a condescension towards those who were unable to do likewise) and also the content- 'Mirra' for example, is a tragedy of incest, something not tackled by most squeamish 17th C. prats and something with much bearing on Byron's personality (he rated it superior to any other modern drama, save Faust- also once, he fainted ((imagine Byron fainting?!!!?)) at a performance of 'Mirra'). He used the name for the name of his heroine in 'Sardanapalus.'

Pick up a used copy of this. It will reinvigorate your life!

If you are studying to become a set theorist these days (2001 or later), you will probably learn forcing by way of partial orders. This is the quickest way to go, and for most purposes, the most useful in applications. It's also the approach that is taken in Kunen's book on set theory, which is still pretty much the standard textbook.

Nonetheless, you may one day find that you need the Boolean algebra approach. This was the approach developed by Scott and Solovay after Cohen's somewhat inscrutable approach to proving the consistency of not-CH had been adequately digested. The Boolean algebra approach is very elegant and algebraic, and the theorems are often better motivated than they are in the partial orders approach.

When I was a graduate student, I studied both approaches, but eventually forgot much of what I learned about Boolean-valued models because in practice I always relied on the other approach.

Recently, however, in some research I've been doing in an extension of ZFC in an extended language, I found that some of the usual assumptions one can make in doing forcing over ZFC models were no longer applicable in the new setting. Without going into the details, the consequence was that I had to do forcing over non-wellfounded models of ZFC and examine the properties of the resulting forcing extension, perhaps iterating the process omega many times. The only way to do this has been to work with Boolean-valued models M^B of the non-wellfounded ground model M, prove the desired properties within M^B, then collapse with a generic ultrafilter, and go on to the next model.

Well, after that long-winded introduction, my point is this: Bell's treatment of Boolean-valued models is outstanding. I have several of Bell's books and his talent as an expositor is his relentless attention to detail. He does no hand-waving. If you need to face the details of Boolean-valued models, Bell's approach is the right way to go.

In the first chapter he develops the theory enough to prove that all ZFC axioms hold in V^B. In Chapter 2 he shows how to do independence proofs in Boolean valued models -- illustrating with CH and developing the usual results about chain conditions and distributivity, never once working with a 2-valued forcing extension. The third chapter reveals some of the elegance of the Boolean algebra approach in its development of the proof of the consistency of not-AC using group actions. Chapter 4 shows how to get the usual results about forcing involving 2-valued models by considering (V^B)/U, where U is a generic ultrafilter. Chapter 5 is a special chapter about cardinal collapsing, introduced because the Boolean algebras introduced before always preserved cardinals and cofinalities. Finally, chapter 6, which was added in the 1985 edition, treats iterated forcing. This chapter contains details that appear nowhere else and are very handy if you need to deal with such things.

As ever, Bell has done a thorough job in his treatment of this subject. It is the right reference for Boolean-valued models of set theory.

When I first purchased this I expected to easily tell the difference between Vallejo's and Bell's work. Both however worked very heavily along the same theme and did an excellent job. If you enjoy Vallejo's work then you'll enjoy this calander. I have also been a Julie Bell fan and her work in this calander is as good as her solo work.