Anselm, Basic Writings: Proslogium; Monologium; Cur Deus Homo; Gaunilo's In Behalf of the Fool
Immanuel Kant, Great Books of the Western World, vol. 42: Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; Excerpts from the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Judgment
J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview
Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions
Fiction:
Ben Bova, ed., The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, volume 2A
Tony Daniel, Metaplanetary: A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War
Gardner Dozois, ed., The Year's Best Science Fiction, multiple volumes
Michael Moorcock, Behold the Man
Comments:
1. I'm very happy about the Anselm and the Kant. These are collections with their most important writings in single volumes that I got for less than $3.50 each. I've been hamstrung on several occasions by not having a specific text to reference for Kant, and now I have one. This is the third volume of Great Books of the Western World that I've bought, after the two Aristotle volumes. I might get some others, notably those collecting the great scientific writings. Yes, of course you can read Anselm and Kant online, they're in the public domain, but a) when I'm writing something I need a specific edition and its specific page numbers to reference (I'm not comfortable with just writing "A341, B399"); and b) I haven't made the transition to reading books on a screen instead of the written page yet. I hope I'll be able to at some point. But regardless, after the zombie apocalypse, all of the books we've stored on our Kindles will no longer be accessible, but all the hard copies will be.
2. I'm paying much more than I usually pay for the Moreland and Craig ($20) but I think it's worth it. I've been wanting that book for a while, and I found several copies that were over ten bucks cheaper than it usually is.
3. I'm very interested to read Rosenberg. He debated Craig, which you can watch here or read here, and it was later published by Routledge with essays on the debate by several other philosophers, scientists, and rhetoricians. The issue I'm most interested in is Rosenberg's claim that his conclusions are scientific -- that is, that science leads us to his conclusions, not philosophical argument. The conclusions in question seem to be eliminative materialism, which denies (for example) that anyone has beliefs and that sentences have meaning.
4. The list would be a lot longer if I listed all the volumes of Dozois's Year's Best SF that I've bought recently. I'll write a separate post on them. One of my reasons for wanting these is that they're how I troll for new authors.
5. The book store actually sent the wrong book instead of Dozois's The Good Stuff, but they immediately apologized, sent me the right one via priority shipping, and told me to do whatever I want with the one they sent accidentally. So although it hasn't arrived yet, all's right with the world. The Good Stuff is two books in one volume (The Good Old Stuff and The Good New Stuff). Most of them are not in my volumes of Year's Best SF. I always find it hard to resist multiple books in a single volume for the price of a normal book (see: Anselm and Kant).
6. I've been wanting Interplanetary for a while now. Tony Daniel is one of those authors I discovered reading Dozois's Year's Best SF.
7. Ben Bova edited the second volume of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, which, ironically, is itself collected in two volumes, and which collects the best novellas from before about 1960. (Volume 1 does the same for short stories, and was edited by Robert Silverburg.) So I got volume 2A which is the first volume of the second volume. I want to point out here that these are the only books by Bova that I will get, because he just edited them. When I was getting back into science fiction about 20 years ago, one of the first books I read was his Saturn. It was horrible. Some people on a spaceship going to Saturn, they don't even arrive until the last 50 pages or so, the characters were ridiculous (the bad guy was a fundamentalist Christian woman who was secretly a lesbian or something), and the big reveal at the end is that the rings of Saturn are actually alive. Terrible and beyond disappointing because it looked liked Bova was writing novels about one of the particular types of science fiction I love (near future exploration and settlement of our solar system). He wrote a whole series of novels called Grand Tour that are set on various planets, dwarf planets, moons, and asteroids. But after Saturn left such a horrible taste in my brain, I'm off him for good.
8. Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man is another one I've been wanting a long time. I've read about this book, and I have a short story idea that's moderately similar (although not anti-Christian as his seems to be), so I wanted to compare my idea to Moorcock's. There are several other stories and books in the "time-travelling to see Jesus" sub-sub-genre: here's a list.
Update (30 Aug.): This is one part funny, one part annoying. The bookstore that sent me the wrong book just sent me another copy of the same wrong book. It's The Captive by Victoria Holt. It appears to be a gothic romance, meaning it is not remotely similar to the actual book I ordered, The Good Stuff: Adventure Science Fiction in the Grand Tradition.
Update (2 Sep.): Now it's just annoying. The book they sent has an almost identical ISBN to what I'd ordered, and they realized they never had the actual book I wanted. So they apologized and refunded my money. Which is fine, but I'd wanted to trade that money for the book.
No comments:
Post a Comment