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In this modern rendition, the beauty of the Sanskrit slokas is reflected in the rythmic flow of the english verse of poetic proportions. Besides, the attendant philosophy of that is Bhagvad-Gita is captured in contemporary idiom for easy comprehension....

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The spiritual ethos and the philosophical outlook that the Bhagvad - Gita postulates paves the way for the liberation of man, who, as Rousseau said, ‘being born free, is everywhere in chains’. But equally it is a mirror of human psychology, which enables man to discern his debilities for appropriate redressal. All the same, the boon of an oral tradition that kept it alive for over two millennia became its bane with the proliferation of interpolations therein. Besides muddying its pristine philosophy, these insertions affect the sequential conformity and structural economy of the grand discourse. What is worse, to the chagrin of the majority of the Hindus, some of these legitimize the inimical caste system while upholding the priestly perks and prejudices....

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Excerpt: Of that sort of Dramatic Poem which is call?d Tragedy; Tragedy, as it was antiently compos?d, hath been ever held the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other Poems: therefore said by Aristotle to be of power by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions, that is to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight, stirr?d up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated. Nor is Nature wanting in her own effects to make good his assertion: for so in Physic things of melancholic hue and quality are us?d against melancholy, sowr against sowr, salt to remove salt humours. Hence Philosophers and other gravest Writers, as Cicero, Plutarch and others, frequently cite out of Tragic Poets, both to adorn and illustrate thir discourse....

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Table of Contents: Of that sort of Dramatic Poem which is call?d Tragedy, 1 -- The ARGUMENT., 2 -- The Persons., 3 -- SAMSON Agonistes., 4

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Excerpt: Several years ago, when the Author retired to his native mountains with the hope of being enabled to construct a literary work that might live, it was a reasonable thing that he should take a review of his own mind, and examine how far Nature and Education had qualified him for such an employment. ?As subsidiary to this preparation, he undertook to record, in verse, the origin and progress of his own powers, as far as he was acquainted with them. ?That work, addressed to a dear friend, most distinguished for his knowledge and genius, and to whom the Author?s intellect is deeply indebted, has been long finished; and the result of the investigation which gave rise to it, was a determination to compose a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society, and to be entitled the ?Recluse?; as having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement....

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Table of Contents: ADVERTISEMENT, ii -- BOOK FIRST INTRODUCTION?CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL-TIME 1 -- BOOK SECOND SCHOOL-TIME (continued), 19 -- BOOK THIRD RESIDENCE AT CAMBRIDGE, 33 -- BOOK FOURTH SUMMER VACATION, 51 -- BOOK FIFTH BOOKS, 64 -- BOOK SIXTH CAMBRIDGE AND THE ALPS, 81 -- BOOK SEVENTH RESIDENCE IN LONDON, 103 -- BOOK EIGHTH RETROSPECT?LOVE OF NATURE LEADING TO -- LOVE OF MAN, 125 -- BOOK NINTH RESIDENCE IN FRANCE, 144 -- BOOK TENTH RESIDENCE IN FRANCE (continued), 161 -- BOOK ELEVENTH FRANCE (concluded), 178 -- BOOK TWELFTH IMAGINATION AND TASTE, HOW IMPAIRED -- AND RESTORED, 192 -- BOOK THIRTEENTH IMAGINATION AND TASTE, HOWIMPAIRED -- AND RESTORED (concluded), 202 -- BOOK FOURTEENTH CONCLUSION, 213...

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Excerpt: The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Volume Three.

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Contents TRANSLATIONS .............................................................................................................................. 7 HYMN TO MERCURY .............................................................................................................................................. 7 HOMER?S HYMN TO CASTOR AND POLLUX .................................................................................................. 26 HOMER?S HYMN TO THE MOON ....................................................................................................................... 26 HOMER?S HYMN TO THE SUN ............................................................................................................................ 27 HOMER?S HYMN TO THE EARTH: MOTHER OF ALL .................................................................................. 28 HOMER?S HYMN TO MINERVA.......................................................................................................................... 29 HOMER?S HYMN TO VENUS ...........................................................................................................

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Introduction: No answer is given in the lysis to the question, ?What is Friendship?? any more than in the Charmides to the question, ?What is Temperance?? There are several resemblances in the two Dialogues: the same youthfulness and sense of beauty pervades both of them; they are alike rich in the description of Greek life. The question is again raised of the relation of knowledge to virtue and good, which also recurs in the Laches; and Socrates appears again as the elder friend of the two boys, Lysis and Menexenus. In the Charmides, as also in the Laches, he is described as middleaged; in the Lysis he is advanced in years....

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Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a sophisticated novell with extremely hard to comprehend philosophical ideas lying on the border of paranoia, orthodoxal believing of God and psychological researches on human nature. Every sentence sounds like a sort of revelation to an unprepared reader’s mind and causes a deep flashback thoughts which are impossible to get rid of, which also require an immediate solution. Though it’s hard to define precisely what kind of content presented in novell but one can say it is a sort of impossible mixture of traditional Dostoevsky’s ideas of loneliness, ideas of internal human confilct, ideas of freedom and interhuman relationship. Reader keeps interest to the story in all time whilst he reads it. Such an effect is achieved by author’s methodical strikes right into reader’s head, so when you read a novell you have an extremely real experience of YOU being THERE, of you experiencing all that awe of facing loneliness and society exile. All that Dostoevsky literator’s power teleports you right into that underground, right into that dirty yellow (when you read Dostoevsky’s book you realize that...

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Literature

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volunteers bring you 16 recordings of Be Kind When You Can by Eliza Cook. This was the Weekly Poetry project for January 30, 2011. Eliza Cook was an English author, Chartist poet and writer born in London Road, Southwark. She was the daughter of a local tradesman. She attended the local Sunday Schools and was encouraged by the son of the music master to produce her first volume of poetry. From this she took confidence and in 1837 began to offer verse to the radical Weekly Dispatch, then edited by William Johnson Fox. She was a staple of its pages for the next ten years. She also offered material to The Literary Gazette, Metropolitan Magazine and New Monthly. (summary from Wikipedia)...

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Literature, Poetry, Advice, Instruction, Philosophy, Romance

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Excerpt: The ion is the shortest, or nearly the shortest, of all the writings which bear the name of Plato, and is not authenticated by any early external testimony. The grace and beauty of this little work supply the only, and perhaps a sufficient, proof of its genuineness. The plan is simple; the dramatic interest consists entirely in the contrast between the irony of Socrates and the transparent vanity and childlike enthusiasm of the rhapsode Ion. The theme of the Dialogue may possibly have been suggested by the passage of Xenophon?s Memorabilia in which the rhapsodists are described by Euthydemus as ?very precise about the exact words of Homer, but very idiotic themselves.?...

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Introduction: The Euthydemus, though apt to be regarded by us only as an elaborate jest, has also a very serious purpose. It may fairly claim to be the oldest treatise on logic; for that science originates in the misunderstandings which necessarily accompany the first efforts of speculation. Several of the fallacies which are satirized in it reappear in the Sophistici Elenchi of Aristotle and are retained at the end of our manuals of logic....

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volunteers bring you 9 recordings of The Day-Dream by Sir Thomas Moore. This was the fortnightly poetry project for July 12th, 2009.

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Poetry, Literature, Philosophy, Romance

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volunteers bring you 11 recordings of Impartiality by James Russell Lowell. This was the Weekly Poetry project for January 16, 2011. James Russell Lowell was an American Romantic poet, critic, editor, and diplomat. He is associated with the Fireside Poets, a group of New England writers who were among the first American poets who rivaled the popularity of British poets. These poets usually used conventional forms and meters in their poetry, making them suitable for families entertaining at their fireside. (Summary from Wikipedia)...

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Poetry, Literature, Philosophy

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Excerpt: A Treatise on Government by Aristotle, translated by William Ellis.

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Introduction: In the MENO, Anytus had parted from Socrates with the significant words: ?That in any city, and particularly in the city of Athens, it is easier to do men harm than to do them good;? and Socrates was anticipating another opportunity of talking with him. In the Euthyphro, Socrates is awaiting his trial for impiety. But before the trial begins, Plato would like to put the world on their trial, and convince them of ignorance in that very matter touching which Socrates is accused. An incident which may perhaps really have occurred in the family of Euthyphro, a learned Athenian diviner and soothsayer, furnishes the occasion of the discussion....

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“For there is no light of justice or temperance, or any of the higher ideas which are precious to souls, in the earthly copies of them: they are seen through a glass, dimly…” Socrates and his earnest friend Phaedrus, enjoying the Athenian equivalent of a lunchtime stroll in the park, exchange views on love and on the power of words, spoken and written. Phaedrus is the most enchanting of Plato’s Erotic dialogues (capitalised in honour of the god). The barefoot philosopher urges an eager young acquaintance – who has allowed his lover’s oratorical skills to impress him overmuch – to re-examine the text of Lysias’s speech in the light of his own exalted (and Platonic) vision of Love. Not long ago this early example of literary dismantling was itself deconstructed by a contemporary sage - Jacques Derrida. The present reader tries to present Socrates as he conceivably was: the chortling, pot-bellied ex-soldier, a flirtatious yet charismatic talker with a serious passion for Truth. (Introduction by Martin Geeson)...

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Literature, Philosophy, Classics (antiquity)

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Introduction: The Menexenus has more the character of a rhetorical exercise than any other of the Platonic works. The writer seems to have wished to emulate Thucydides, and the far slighter work of Lysias. In his rivalry with the latter, to whom in the Phaedrus Plato shows a strong antipathy, he is entirely successful, but he is not equal to Thucydides. The Menexenus, though not without real Hellenic interest, falls very far short of the rugged grandeur and political insight of the great historian. The fiction of the speech having been invented by Aspasia is well sustained, and is in the manner of Plato, notwithstanding the anachronism which puts into her mouth an allusion to the peace of Antalcidas, an event occurring forty years after the date of the supposed oration. But Plato, like Shakespeare, is careless of such anachronisms, which are not supposed to strike the mind of the reader. The effect produced by these grandiloquent orations on Socrates, who does not recover after having heard one of them for three days and more, is truly Platonic....

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Excerpt: ACT I. SCENE I. Manfred, the lamp must be replenish?d, but even then It will not burn so long as I must watch. My slumbers -- if I slumber -- are not sleep, But a continuance of enduring thought, Which then I can resist not: in my heart There is a vigil, and these eyes but close To look within; and yet I live, and bear The aspect and the form of breathing men. But grief should be the instructor of the wise; Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most Must mourn the deepest o?er the fatal truth, The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life. Philosophy and science, and the springs Of wonder, and the wisdom of the world....

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Excerpt: Plato?s ?Timaeus,?translated by Benjamin Jowett.

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Frederick Elliot is a student at early 20th century Cambridge, a university that seems like paradise to him, amongst bright if cynical companions, when he receives a visit from two friends, an engaged young woman, Agnes Pembroke, and her older brother, Herbert. The Pembrokes are Rickie’s only friends from home. An orphan who grew up living with cousins, he was sent to a public (boarding) school where he was shunned and bullied because of his lame foot, an inherited weakness, and frail body. Agnes, as it happens, is engaged to Gerald, now in the army, who was one of the sturdy youths who bullied Rickie at school. Rickie is not brilliant at argument, but he is intensely responsive to poetry and art, and is accepted within a circle of philosophical and intellectual fellow-students led by a brilliant but especially cynical aspiring philosopher, Stuart Ansell, who refuses, when he is introduced to her, even to acknowledge that Agnes exists. (from Wikipedia)...

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Literature

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Geschichte des Agathon, Teil 2 by Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) Verbesserte und erweiterte Ausgabe von 1794. Wieland war – neben Lessing, Lichtenberg und Kant – der bedeutendste und reflexionsmächtigste Schriftsteller der Aufklärung im deutschen Sprachgebiet und der Älteste des klassischen Viergestirns von Weimar (Herder, Goethe, Schiller). Die Geschichte des Agathon gilt als der erste große Bildungs- und Erziehungsroman in der deutschen Literatur und als Vorläufer des modernen psychologischen Romans. (Zusammenfassung von Wikipedia)...

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Literature

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Geschichte des Agathon, Teil 3 (von Teil 1-3). by Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) Verbesserte und erweiterte Ausgabe von 1794. Wieland war – neben Lessing, Lichtenberg und Kant – der bedeutendste und reflexionsmächtigste Schriftsteller der Aufklärung im deutschen Sprachgebiet und der Älteste des klassischen Viergestirns von Weimar (Herder, Goethe, Schiller). Die Geschichte des Agathon gilt als der erste große Bildungs- und Erziehungsroman in der deutschen Literatur und als Vorläufer des modernen psychologischen Romans. (Zusammenfassung von Wikipedia)...

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Literature