What are your thoughts on Harold Bloom's list of books essential to the Western Literary Canon?

I think reading really old math and science books is a waste of time desu, it makes the list seem pretentious. Just read a modern book.

Now that I saw this list , it's better. A lot more succinct and delves into various fields. The ancient Greeks should suffice for the most part as a great foundation.

You could narrow it down even further and make a 1-2 year long reading list of the most influential texts ever written, then leave people free to choose their specialty afterward from there.
>The Iliad, Odyssey
>Republic
>The Categories, Physics
>The Bible
>Elements
>Meditations on First Philosophy
>Principia Mathematica
>Social Contract
>Origin of Species
>Kapital
Basically give students an option to choose among a selection of all those books (and others) in this list, but make sure they study the above in depth to understand just how important they are. It's a great list but I can't help but wonder how much students take away from it, that's an enormous amount of content to cover in only four years.

The point isn't to memorize formulae like an (Logos forgive me for uttering this word) engineer, it's to understand where the ideas came from and how they developed into what we have today. It's not enough to know the formulas for electric fields and such, you should also know how they were figured out and shared with the rest of the world.

Your last three are a waste of time. The only worth they might have is to understand the modern world better, otherwise they're worthless.

I didn't attend St John's but I assume they spend all four years reading and discussing those books in depth. I don't think it's like a Harvard or Yale reading list where you're expected to just read it on your own if you're not in the classics or history programs.

>Your last three are a waste of time.
They're incredibly important, you could skip Homer or the math but not these
>The only worth they might have is to understand the modern world better
Well, yeah, that's the point. You should understand why our society is set up like it is, why religion is dying in the West and secular humanism is taking its place, and if you don't have some knowledge of Communism you're just ignorant. If you ignore these, you're not an intellectual - you're merely a historian.

My point was that they have nothing to offer intellectually. You can get a synopsis of the ideas they present to understand the modern world but I don't think reading them is a necessity especially if you have a good foundation to compare them to. I believe I have a decent understanding of what these ideas represent and have refutations on them without reading their works.

Don't read Kapital just to "understand communism". Most communists don't even read it.

This. You might as well just read Utopia and explain that people thought they could get there by massively oversupplying goods to the point where they were effectively free. Might lead into an interesting discussion of the oversupply problem and how it destroys capital, but to my knowledge there's not many good books about it.

For economics I'd think Bagehot's Lombard Street and Smith's Wealth of Nations would be better. MAYBE also Keynes, but Keynesianism is so deeply flawed I'm not sure it's worth it.

>I believe I have a decent understanding of what these ideas represent and have refutations on them without reading their works.
Red flag. If your time is limited then that might be a valid reason to pass, but if not then it smacks of hubris to think that you can refute an argument you haven't even read. Personally I recognize communism as one of the absolute most cancerous memes in all of human history and deserving of being stamped out with extreme prejudice, but that's because of what keeps happening when avowed communists are given any power at all, not because I found flaws in their arguments.

>cannon
Goes boom.

Based.

RIP Harold Bloom. We must carry the torch and tell the School of Resentment to burn in hell

If you have a foundation to compare something to then it seems unnecessary to participate in their dialectics. For example a Christian would automatically have many problems with any humanist system including Communism. You argue based on fundamental issues not the issues they would bring up about economics or whatever. If you want to read it it's fine, but it isn't a necessity if you've received their ideas through other means. I'm not sure if I've explained it correctly, but go ahead and read it if you haven't been exposed to it at all.

Canon*

:L

So, is fucking based

Based

> (Logos forgive me for uttering this word)
HOLY FUCKING KEK

HTRAB list > William Durant's 100 books >>>TWC

>No Plotinus
Sure just leave out the guy whose Philosophy shaped all Christian, Islamic and Jewish theology that came after him

Terrible b8

This is not chronological so it's annoying

pseud list from a tranny

Plotinus is listed in there under sophomore readings you sped

I'd put Plotinus on my list, sure. Haven't read him myself yet so I left him off.
So what was it that triggered you? The Marx?

>only has one work by Wagner
Bad list.

>salman rushdie
>zadie smith
>edward said
>judith butler

Western Canon or English Canon? LMAOOOO look at the amount of worthless english authors in this list

Obviously biased toward Jewish, Angloids holes, degenerates and leftists. The following people:
>(((Montaigne)))
>Austen (lmao)
>Whitman (faggot)
>Dickinson
>Eliot
>(((Freud))) (this one is the most blatant exemple of this list being biased toward jews)
>(((Proust)))
>(((Woolf))) (honorary jewess)
>(((Kafka)))
>Neruda
>Pessoa
>Beckett
Have no business being ranked among the greatest writers of western literature. There is also some blatant omission such as Racine and Hugo. It looks like French writers have to be partly Jewish to make it to this list.

>The only worth they might have is to understand the modern world better
is that not a worthwhile goal?

Not necessarily. Lobachevsky developed his form of non-Euclidean geometry by thinking hard about Ancient and early Modern attempts to defend the fifth postulate of Euclid's Elements, and Einstein used an old method of Galileo's for his relativity theorems. Even besides being able to use old insights to inspire or make new ones, you can see how defensible (or indefensible) some famous scientific thoughts were by reading them directly; Galileo used circles for his orbits (which had to be corrected to ellipses by Kepler) because he thought perfect circles were divine. Sometimes you see correct insights that depended on more meagre observations drawn out without the reliance on testing we expect, as with Pascal's work on the weight of water and air.

>No Claudel
Bad list.

>Principia Mathematica
I don't know about that

>What do you think about this Jew's opinion
It belongs in the gas chamber

Newton's Principia? If you're thinking of the Russell/Whitehead Principia, then totally.

>He should have got rid of ancient Indian texts and the Quran, they're not Western.
The Western canon includes works that have inspired Western literature as well like 1001 nights.

Which parts do you consider filler?

>Principia Mathematica

Too confusing. We use Leibniz's formulation much more, and fluxion notation mainly survives in physics because it's quicker to put a dot over a variable than write d/dt all the time.

>>Austen (lmao)
Whats wrong with her?

It is, but you live in the modern world and should have already been exposed to their ideas as they shaped the world you live in. If your pursuit is for truth then reading them would be a waste of time. Although this "truth" depends on your worldview that would be shaped by them to begin with if you grew up in the West. It is dangerous for those without a strong foundation to counter their ideas/theories/narratives. Anyway I won't derail the thread any further, just my two cents on the matter.

Everyone is tearing it apart but no one can name a better list.

Because "lists" for art are pointless, you tasteless faggot

Nigga, you're on Yea Forums. LMFAO

The guy is jewish so what did you expect?

Just because you like to jerk off to charts of books you'll neve read doesn't mean all of us are the same, retard

Nigga, you're on Yea Forums, stop pretending you read.

>There is also some blatant omission such as Racine and Hugo.
Both are on the list. You're evidently illiterate and should keep your mouth shut.

It's not a bad list (or at least not a list of bad books), sure, but what is it for anyway? Is it a list of recommendations? (Too massive to orient oneself in.) Is it a guide to what was influential? (It isn't, there's many great writers on there that had pretty much influence on western literature overall.)
Besides, Bloom himself rejects the list and didn't make an another, better one.

I seriously doubt Bloom read more than 40% of the list.

>pretty much [no] influence

I think a lot of people don't really understand the point of the shortlist (of 26 writers). Like, most people seem to think that the list is meant to be the 26 most essential writers in western history, which it isn't. Every writer is just talked about incidentally to their possessing certain qualities which engender canonicity, and he picked them because they were the ones with which he had the most familiarity, or, because they were relatively easy to write about in such a way as to isolate and illustrate these qualities.

I guess that the mistake is easy to make though, if you only read the wikipedia article and not the actual book.

EVERYONE POST THEIR TOP 26

Here's mine (chronological):

1. The Holy Bible
2. Homer
3. Sophocles
4. Plato
5. Aristotle
6. Horace
7. Virgil
8. Ovid
9. Augustine
10. Aquinas
11. Dante
12. Petrarch
13. Montaigne
14. Cervantes
15. Shakespeare
16. Moliére
17. Milton
18. Kant
19. Goethe
20. Wordsworth
21. Melville
22. Dostoevsky
23. Nietzsche
24. Ibsen
25. Joyce
26. Foucault

r8 it

Nothing wrong with her, the poster is just a flaming faggot

Fuck you ungrateful subhuman