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 The most influential academic books in history

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Meles meles
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PostSubject: The most influential academic books in history   The most influential academic books in history EmptyTue 10 Nov 2015, 15:49

The list of the "most influential academic books in history" .... as voted for by the British general public (but from an academically-approved short-list!), in 2015.

For more info see: The most influential acedemic books


The top 20:

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Orientalism by Edward Said
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer
The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson
The Meaning of Relativity by Albert Einstein
The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
The Republic by Plato
The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
Ways of Seeing by John Berger


............ any comments?
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Triceratops
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PostSubject: Re: The most influential academic books in history   The most influential academic books in history EmptyTue 10 Nov 2015, 16:08

Meles meles wrote:

For more info see: The most influential acedemic books

Acedemic ????. Somebody at the Guardian should get a dictionary.

No mention of anything written by Copernicus.
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Meles meles
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PostSubject: Re: The most influential academic books in history   The most influential academic books in history EmptyTue 10 Nov 2015, 16:15

Personally I'm appalled that the huge corpus of work that comprises Germaine Greer's "The Female Eunuch", should be ranked lower that the works of that notorious misogynist William Shakespeare... who himself actually was ranked only just lower than "Silent Spring", by Rachel Carson. The list clearly has a male-centric bias. Wink

But who am I to argue with the great British public?


Last edited by Meles meles on Tue 10 Nov 2015, 17:13; edited 1 time in total (Reason for editing : spelling of misogynist)
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ferval
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PostSubject: Re: The most influential academic books in history   The most influential academic books in history EmptyTue 10 Nov 2015, 16:58

I don't think that list is ranked according to the public vote, Darwin at 26% was overwhelmingly the most popular.

I'm just confused by how the designation 'academic' was defined but then, so are the organisers.

“This is a fascinating and salutary list for academics – put together by people who work with academic books but who are not themselves academics, it reflects the reality of what a wider public sees as ‘academic’,” said Dr Samantha Rayner, principal investigator on the Academic Book of the Future project, a two-year initiative exploring the future of the academic book funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in collaboration with the British Library. “This may not be what academics agree with – it will be a controversial list – but will, we hope, provoke valuable discussion for the project about the nature and impact of academic books.”
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Gilgamesh of Uruk
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PostSubject: Re: The most influential academic books in history   The most influential academic books in history EmptyTue 10 Nov 2015, 17:11

Hmm. Worrying if people really think most of those are "academic" - suggests the project might as well go home.
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nordmann
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PostSubject: Re: The most influential academic books in history   The most influential academic books in history EmptyTue 10 Nov 2015, 17:26

It's all academic really.
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PostSubject: Re: The most influential academic books in history   The most influential academic books in history EmptyWed 11 Nov 2015, 07:39

Though if they'd only asked "academics" they would surely have ended up with reference books regarded as the "bible" for each field of study. No medical person could have resisted placing "Gray's Anatomy" on the list, for example.

And Plato's "Republic" would surely have been listed as the great grandfather of all academic literature by many, not just philosophy students - it's been continuously studied now for almost 2,500 years.
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Triceratops
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PostSubject: Re: The most influential academic books in history   The most influential academic books in history EmptyWed 11 Nov 2015, 09:31

I think there should be a mention for Clausewitz's book On War, since this would have a major impact on what happened in 1914.



The most influential academic books in history KitchenerSmOpt
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PostSubject: Re: The most influential academic books in history   The most influential academic books in history EmptyFri 12 Jul 2024, 20:39

nordmann wrote:
Though if they'd only asked "academics" they would surely have ended up with reference books regarded as the "bible" for each field of study. No medical person could have resisted placing "Gray's Anatomy" on the list, for example.

And Plato's "Republic" would surely have been listed as the great grandfather of all academic literature by many, not just philosophy students - it's been continuously studied now for almost 2,500 years.

And that’s not to mention Euclid’s Elements. An ancient Greek text which formed the basis of geometry and much of the rest of mathematics for over 2200 years. For some reason it fell out of fashion in the 20th Century.

There is some academic debate about just how much of a ‘set text’ it really was for scholars during those 2 millennia. It was, nevertheless, hugely influential in Greek, Western and Islamic scholastic history. For instance, during the Counter-Reformation, the Bavarian monk Christoph Clau wrote a new translation and commentary on the Elements in 1574 in what could be seen as having been an already crowded field. Several academics, both Catholic and Protestant had been keen to promote the classic text and claim its wisdom for their own. Works in several languages including French, German and English were published.

One might be forgiven, therefore, for thinking that it was game-over for the Catholic church and Vatican academic supremacy at that point. But not a bit of it. The Counter-Reformation was well named. Not only was it Clau’s book which accompanied the Jesuit Matteo Ricci on his seminal mission to China the following decade, but Euclid’s Elements were subsequently translated into Chinese based on Clau’s work. It remained a set text in China after the revolution of 1911 which saw the end of the imperial dynasty and continued after the Communist takeover in 1949. Even the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s spared Euclid at a time when, in the West, academic institutions (such as Eton College and Cambridge University among others) were disowning Euclidian mathematics along with the study of English grammar etc.          

The Elements do include a dubious if not problematic postulate in the very first book, yet Clau’s own mathematical acumen is not in question. Not only was he an expert on Euclid but Clau was also astronomical director of the great project of his patron pope Gregory XIII. That project was the Gregorian Calendar of 1582 which not only reformed mathematical astronomy in the Catholic world but also later in the Protestant world and beyond.
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Meles meles
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PostSubject: Re: The most influential academic books in history   The most influential academic books in history EmptyTue 06 Aug 2024, 15:02

Strange that there's no mention of Isaac Newton's 'Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica' (1687).
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Tim of Aclea
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PostSubject: Re: The most influential academic books in history   The most influential academic books in history EmptyFri 16 Aug 2024, 18:42

I wonder how many of the people who voted for them had actually read all of them?

I also wonder why the Bible and Koran would not be considered as being academic, clearly both very influential.

Tim
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