Given the continued destruction of libraries over the centuries, it is remarkable that any ideas from the ancient world survived to modern times. But survive they did, and the advent of printing from movable metal type in the 15th century insured that multiple copies of these ideas circulated among an increasingly literate audience over the next 500 years.
In the late 1940s, University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins--feeling that the significance of these great ideas was being lost on the modern world, especially businessmen--began a collaboration with the philosopher Mortimer Alder on a project to publish the best of these ideas in a series of lectures, later a series of books (published by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1952), known as Great Books of the Western World:
The project sought to encapsulate "the wisdom of the ages," if you will, in a series that eventually grew to 60 volumes. In its most recent edition, it "represents the essential core of the Western literary canon, compiling 517 of the most significant achievements in literature, history, philosophy, and science." The series covers everything from chance and courage to wealth and will, using authors as diverse as Aeschylus and Sophocles, Ptolemy and Kepler, Keynes and Weber.
Of course, any project making such a claim is bound to be subjected to a fair amount of criticism, and this series is no exception. Almost from the start, the project was criticized for being Eurocentric and too focused on "dead white males." Accordingly, the successor organization to the project, the Great Books Foundation, has--since 1960--made a concerted effort to promote "reading and discussion of great literature wherever it is found, including literature by outstanding contemporary authors, women authors, and authors from all over the world."
But the survival of great ideas has had many other champions. In 1963, at the 11th International Printing Machinery and Allied Trades Exhibition in London, a project that took a less prescriptive approach to great ideas came along that gave rise to its own disciples....
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