Digital Resources for A World of Ideas
A World of Ideas offers more than just a great text. Online you’ll find both free and affordable premium resources to help stu- dents get even more out of the book and your course. You’ll also find convenient instructor resources, such as downloadable sample syllabi, classroom activities, and even a nationwide community of teachers. To learn more about or order any of the products
PREFACE ix
below, contact your Bedford/St. Martin’s sales representative, e-mail sales support ([email protected]), or visit the Web site at bedfordstmartins.com.
Take Advantage of What the Web Can Do with New e-Pages for A World of Ideas. Favorite readings from past editions give your students even more important thinkers to help them explore ideas, and color images from the “Visualizing” features give your students a better look at works of art that relate to great ideas. To access this fea- ture, go to bedfordstmartins.com/worldofideas/epages.
A Fully Updated Student Site Gives Students More Ways to Explore A World of Ideas. At bedfordstmartins.com/worldofideas, students will find links to full-text documents of historical and philo- sophical interest, more information on each selection’s author and his or her ideas, and the book’s e-Pages, which are accessible through a code included in the book. Instructors will find the helpful instructor’s manual, which includes a sentence outline for every selection.
Let Students Choose Their Format. Students can now purchase A World of Ideas in popular e-book formats for computers, tablets, and e-readers. For more details, visit bedfordstmartins.com/ebooks.
VideoCentral is a growing collection of videos for the writing class that captures real-world, academic, and student writers talking about how and why they write. VideoCentral can be packaged for free with A World of Ideas. An activation code is required. To order Video- Central packaged with the print book, use ISBN 978-1-4576-4342-2.
Re:Writing Plus gathers all of the Bedford/St. Martin’s premium digital content for composition into one online collection. It includes hundreds of model documents, the first ever peer-review game, and VideoCentral. Re:Writing Plus can be purchased separately or packaged with the print book at a significant discount. An activation code is required. To order Re:Writing Plus packaged with A World of Ideas, use ISBN 978-1-4576-4338-5.
Teaching Ce ntral (bedfordstmartins.com/teachingcentral) offers the entire list of Bedford/St. Martin’s print and online professional resources in one place. You’ll find landmark reference works, source- books on pedagogical issues, award-winning collections, and practical advice for the classroom—all free for instructors.
Bits (bedfordbits.com) collects creative ideas for teaching a range of composition topics in an easily searchable blog. A community of
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x PREFACE
teachers—leading scholars, authors, and editors—discuss revision, research, grammar and style, technology, peer review, and much more. Take, use, adapt, and pass the ideas around. Then, come back to the site to comment or share your own suggestion.
Bedford Coursespacks allow you to easily integrate our most popular content into your own course management system. For details, visit bedfordstmartins.com/coursepacks.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to a number of people who made important sug- gestions for earlier editions, among them Shoshana Milgram Knapp of Virginia Polytechnic and State University and Michael Hennessy of Texas State University–San Marcos. I want to thank Jon Marc Smith of Texas State University–San Marcos and Chiara Sulprizio of the Loyola Marymount University for assisting with the instructor’s manual for the eighth edition. I also remain grateful to Michael Bybee of St. John’s College in Santa Fe for suggesting many fascinating pieces by Eastern thinkers, all of which he has taught to his own students. Thanks to him, this edition includes Lao-tzu.
Like its predecessors, the ninth edition is indebted to a great many creative people at Bedford/St. Martin’s, whose support is invalu- able. I want to thank Charles Christensen, former president, whose concern for the excellence of this book and whose close attention to detail were truly admirable. I appreciate as always the advice of Joan E. Feinberg, copresident of Macmillan Higher Education, and Denise Wydra, president of Bedford/St. Martin’s, whose suggestions were timely and excellent. Nancy Perry, editorial director, Custom Pub- lishing, New York; Karen Henry, editor in chief, English; and Steve Scipione, executive editor, offered many useful ideas and suggestions as well, especially in the early stages of development, and kept their sharp eyes on the project throughout. My editor for the eighth edi- tion, Maura Shea, is the professional’s professional. My editor for the current edition, Alicia Young, has been a steady guiding hand, dis- cussing material with me and providing help where necessary and when timely. She has been an inspiration in dealing with sometimes intractable problems and responding with encouragement and the kind of help only the best editors can provide.
Assisting her were a number of hardworking individuals, includ- ing Charlotte Christy and Bethany Gordon. Anne Noonan, production editor, also helped with innumerable important details and sugges- tions. Mary Lou Wilshaw-Watts, copyeditor, improved the prose
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PREFACE xi
and watched out for inconsistencies. Thanks also to several staff members and researchers: Jenn Kennett cleared text permissions, Donna Dennison found the cover art and designed the cover, and Linda Finigan secured all the new photographs. In earlier edi- tions, I had help from Diane Kraut, Maura Shea, Sarah Cornog, Rosemary Winfield, Michelle Clark, Professor Mary W. Cornog, Ellen Kuhl, Mark Reimold, Andrea Goldman, Beth Castrodale, Jonathan Burns, Mary Beth McNulty, Beth Chapman, Mika De Roo, and Greg Johnson. I feel I had a personal relationship with each of them. I also want to thank the students—quite a few of them—who wrote me directly about their experiences reading the first eight editions. I have attended carefully to what they told me, and I am warmed by their high regard for the material in this book.
Earlier editions named hundreds of users of this book who sent their comments and encouragement. I would like to take this oppor- tunity to thank them again. In addition, the following professors were generous with criticism, praise, and detailed recommendations for the ninth edition: D. Michelle Adkerson, Nashville State Community College; Geraldine Cannon Becker, University of Maine at Fort Kent; Aaron Bradford, Folsom Lake College and Pasadena City College; David Elias, Eastern Kentucky University; Jim Ewing, Fresno City College; Michele Giargiari, Bunker Hill Community College; Susan Gorman, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences; Deana Holifield, Pearl River Community College; Shelley Kelly, College of Southern Nevada; Christina Lovin, Eastern Kentucky University; Pam Mathis, North Arkansas College; Aggie Mendoza, Nashville State Community College; Sandra Pyle, Point Park University; Robert Royar, Morehead State University; Sam Ruddick, Bunker Hill Community College; Ron Schwartz, Pierce College; Michele Singletary, Nashville State Community College; Jon Marc Smith, Texas State University– San Marcos; Roberta Stagnaro, San Diego State University; Andrea Van Nort, United States Air Force Academy; Paul Walker, Murray State University; Martha Willoughby, Pearl River Community College; and our reviewers at Chaffey College, Pasadena City College, and Mon- mouth University who wish to remain anonymous. I want to mention particularly the past experiences I had visiting Professor Elizabeth Deis and the faculty and students of Hampden-Sydney College in connec- tion with their writing and humanities programs. Professors James Kenkel and Charlie Sweet were gracious in welcoming me to Eastern Kentucky University for workshops and classes using A World of Ideas. These were delightful and fruitful experiences that helped me shape the book. I am grateful to all who took part in these workshops.
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TO THE STUDENT
When the first edition of A World of Ideas was published, the notion that students in first-year composition courses should be able to read and write about challenging works by great thinkers was a radical one. In fact, no other composition reader at the time included selections from such important thinkers as Hannah Arendt, Aristotle, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Plato, Charles Darwin, or Mary Woll- stonecraft. I had expected a moderate response from a small number of people. Instead, teachers and students alike sent me a swarm of mail commending the book for the challenge it provided and the insights they gained.
One of the first letters I received was from a young woman who had read the book after she graduated from college. She said she had heard of the thinkers included in A World of Ideas but in her college career had never read any of their works. Reading them now, she said, was long overdue. Another student wrote me an elaborate letter in which he demonstrated that every one of the selections in the book had been used as the basis of a Star Trek episode. He sagely connected every selection to a specific episode and convinced me that whoever was writing Star Trek had read some of the world’s most important thinkers. Other students have written to tell me that they found them- selves using the material in this book in other courses, such as psy- chology, philosophy, literature, and history, among others. In many cases, these students were the only ones among their peers who had read the key authors in their discipline.
Sometimes you will have to read the selections in A World of Ideas more than once. Works by influential thinkers, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, James Baldwin, Judith Butler, Adam Smith, Sigmund Freud, Francis Bacon, Iris Murdoch, and Noam Chomsky, can be very challenging. But do not let the challenge discourage you. In “Evaluat- ing Ideas: An Introduction to Critical Reading,” I suggest methods for
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annotating and questioning texts that are designed to help you keep track of what you read and to help you master the material. In addi- tion, each selection is accompanied by a headnote on the author’s life and work, comments about the primary ideas presented in the selec- tion, and a host of questions to help you overcome minor difficulties in understanding the author’s meaning. Some students have written to tell me that their first reading of the book was off-putting, but most of them have written later to tell me how they eventually overcame their initial fear that the selections would be too difficult for them. Ulti- mately, these students agreed with me that this material is important enough to merit their absolute attention.
The purpose of A World of Ideas is to help you learn to write better by giving you something really significant to think and write about. The selections not only are avenues into some of the most seri- ous thought on their subjects but also are stimulating enough to sus- tain close analysis and to produce many good ideas for writing. For example, when you think about democracy, it helps to know what Aristotle said about it while Athens enjoyed it, just as it is important to know what the United States Constitution says that puts democ- racy into law. Elizabeth Cady Stanton defends the rights of women in her “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions,” pointing always to the social injustices that she documents. Frederick Douglass speaks from the perspective of a former slave when he cries out against the injustice of an institution that existed in the Americas for hundreds of years. And a hundred years after Douglass, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. sent his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” still demanding justice for African Americans and freedom seekers everywhere. The questions of ethics that still haunt us are treated by Iris Murdoch in relation to religion and by Kwame Anthony Appiah in relation to situ- ational and virtue ethics, each of which concentrates on the relation of ones’ character to one’s ethical behavior. All these writers place their views in the larger context of a universal dialogue on the subject of justice. When you write, you add your own voice to the conversation. By commenting on the selections, expressing and arguing a position, and pointing out contradictions or contrasts among texts, you are par- ticipating in the world of ideas.
Keep in mind that I prepared A World of Ideas for my own stu- dents, most of whom work their way through college and do not take the idea of earning an education lightly. For that reason, I felt I owed them the opportunity to encounter the very best minds I could put them in touch with. Anything less seemed to me a missed opportu- nity. I hope you, like so many other writing students, find this book both educational and inspiring.