Check out Indie Intellect’s Youtube Channel for more info on these topics and more!

Key Points

• Where do the ideas that govern our modern society come from?
• Certain classic books will teach you what the thought-leaders of the past wrote that influenced what we believe and how we think today.
  • A lot of these things are beliefs that we take for granted and may not even realize that we have.
• The Harvard Classics & The Great Books of the Western World are 2 series of books that seek to compile the definitive classical works that created what we see as modern society.
• Why does it matter to me?
  • To be an independent thinker, you must first understand where the current thoughts and beliefs come from.  A frame of reference is vital to independent thinking!
  • Second, you must develop a first-hand understanding of why you think the way you think if you are to critically think about your own beliefs.
• Both of these book series step from Ancient Greek through Rome, then to the philosophers of the modern and post-modern era to today.
• The evolution of thought is both fascinating and a crucial tool in the thinker’s tool belt.
• Mortimer Adler wrote this idea so eloquently in the first book from the Great Classics:
  • “These books are the means of understanding our society and ourselves.  They contain the great ideas that dominate us without our knowing it.  These is no comparable repository of our tradition.”
• I recommend Great Books of the Western World over the Harvard Classics, but I would encourage anyone to try to get a complete set of both.

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Image courtesy J.D. Falk via Flickr.