Culling the library
Jan. 3rd, 2009 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylPropero-like, pater has decided that, when he retires, he will put aside his Great Work in its entirety. This bittersweet decision — we all see it as sad, like the great magician finally giving up his staff, whereas he seems only too happy to leave it all behind — means that he no longer needs his vast library of books. Consequently, the three of us spent this morning going through the books in his office, attempting to separate the philosophical wheat from the sociological chaff.
I think I've done quite nicely out of the whole thing, picking up around fifty pretty decent books including some of Macintyre's more interesting stuff, a lot of Hegel — I know, I know! — some good philosophy of science stuff including Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a few bits and pieces by Charles Taylor, rather nice hardback copies of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Being and Nothingness, Chris Arthur's student version of Capital and, rather less usefully, Jerry Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History and Jon Elster's Making Sense of Marx (this last contained a long-hand draft of pater's original review of the book from 25 years ago).
Mater did less well, with many of her choices — she wanted to keep all of Levi-Strauss! — attracting sever mockery. In the end she opted to keep a load of Chomsky, Talcott Parson's Toward a General Theory of Action, and, most amusingly given her almost total inability to read French, Merleau-Ponty's Humanisme et terreur and Lucien Goldmann's Le dieu caché, both of which we've already got in translation...
I think I've done quite nicely out of the whole thing, picking up around fifty pretty decent books including some of Macintyre's more interesting stuff, a lot of Hegel — I know, I know! — some good philosophy of science stuff including Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a few bits and pieces by Charles Taylor, rather nice hardback copies of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Being and Nothingness, Chris Arthur's student version of Capital and, rather less usefully, Jerry Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History and Jon Elster's Making Sense of Marx (this last contained a long-hand draft of pater's original review of the book from 25 years ago).
Mater did less well, with many of her choices — she wanted to keep all of Levi-Strauss! — attracting sever mockery. In the end she opted to keep a load of Chomsky, Talcott Parson's Toward a General Theory of Action, and, most amusingly given her almost total inability to read French, Merleau-Ponty's Humanisme et terreur and Lucien Goldmann's Le dieu caché, both of which we've already got in translation...
