World of Ideas by Lee A. Jacobus - Tenth Edition, 2017 from Macmillan Student Store

World of Ideas

Essential Readings for College WritersTenth Edition ©2017 Lee A. Jacobus

The first and bestselling reader of its kind, A World of Ideas introduces students to great thinkers whose ideas have shaped civilizations throughout history. When students hear names like Aristotle, Martin Luther King, Jr., Virginia Woolf, or Sigmund Freud, they recognize the author as impor...
Read more
Students - Buy or Rent
World of Ideas by Lee A. Jacobus - Tenth Edition, 2017 from Macmillan Student Store

Great ideas make great writers

The first and bestselling reader of its kind, A World of Ideas introduces students to great thinkers whose ideas have shaped civilizations throughout history. When students hear names like Aristotle, Martin Luther King, Jr., Virginia Woolf, or Sigmund Freud, they recognize the author as important — and they rise to the challenge of engaging with the text and evaluating it critically. No other composition reader offers a comparable collection of essential readings along with the supportive apparatus students need to understand, analyze, and respond to them.

Features

Forty-nine readings from the world’s greatest thinkers introduce students to the ideas that have shaped Western culture. Writers such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Frederick Douglass, Lao-tzu, and Mary Wollstonecraft examine ideas across six themes: Government, Culture, Wealth, Science, Mind, and Ethics.

Detailed editorial apparatus helps students handle the challenging material.

  • Two chapters on Evaluating Ideas and Writing about Ideas introduce students to best practices for critical reading, thinking, and writing.

  • Part introductions and chapter-wide questions ground students in the history of each idea and connect the philosophies of the individual writers.

  • Pre-reading questions, abundant discussion and connections questions, and writing prompts for each selection help students focus their reading and hone their understanding.

  • Glosses and introductory quotations provide additional context for themes and readings.


A comprehensive Instructor's Manual provides support for your teaching. This exceptionally thorough resource includes sentence outlines for each selection, further background on the selections, suggestions for classroom discussion and student writing assignments, brief bibliographies for every author, and sample syllabi.

New to This Edition

18 new readings from important thinkers include landmark essays from great thinkers across the ages, such as Hsun Tzu’s argument that man’s nature is evil, John Maynard Keynes’s thoughts on the end of a laissez-faire economy, Carol Gilligan’s examination of the self and morality, Francis Fukuyama’s exploration of the middle class and democracy, and Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences.

Two new foundational ideas explore enduring themes that impact students:

  • Culture offers readings on a range of cultural issues, including Jacob Riis’s landmark discussion of race division, arguments about cultural justice from Martin Luther King Jr. and John Rawls, Neil Postman’s essay on language and culture, and discussions on gender from Virginia Woolf, Margaret Mead, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Judith Butler.

  • Science presents classic essays from Plato, Francis Bacon, and Charles Darwin alongside contemporary discussions of science from Richard Feynman, Edward O. Wilson, Michio Kaku, Philip Kitcher, and Lisa Randall.

New chapter-wide questions ask students to relate the text’s themes to their own experience:

  • Considerations questions at the end of each chapter introduction ask students to examine their own assumptions about the theme before they begin reading.

Reflections questions after the last reading in each chapter ask students to reflect on what they have learned about the theme and prompt them to find connections to the readings within their own lives.
 
"I used A World of Ideas when I was enrolled in junior college. And now that I teach at the same institution, I believe it's my moral obligation to provide my English composition students with a similar wealth of ideas that will shape and reshape their views of the world. I am able to fulfill this academic commitment through Lee Jacobus's text, for as Plato would say, it remains ‘truly rich . . . in virtue and wisdom.’"
–Jason Casem, Long Beach City College

"A World of Ideas is the one text you need if you want your students to appreciate how writing has shaped the world they've inherited and the world they will pass on to their children. No other reader on the market comes close. It's the only book in in its class that shows students how writing impacted the world we inherited."
–Greg Underwood, Pearl River Community College

"A World of Ideas takes excerpts from serious, seminal texts and packs them into an amazing anthology. Given that so many students come into college with little in the way of scholarship when it comes to the classics of the Western canon, it seems appropriate to try to expose them to ideas that have shaped Western culture. A composition course might be the only place they are ever allowed to read Thoreau, Machiavelli, Arendt, Douglass or Rousseau."
–Jon Brammer, Three Rivers Community College

"A World of Ideas will open your eyes to areas of immense importance of what it means to be a human being. You are going to read the best that has been written on democracy, government, ethics, wealth, gender, language, and education by not only the greatest thinkers in human history but also the contemporary ones. Challenge these thinkers, and be ready to be enlightened and challenged by them."
–Suocai Su, Harold Washington College

"A World of Ideas is the text that made me an English major."
–Garry Partridge, San Antonio College

Digital Options

EPUB3_EBOOK icon

E-book

Read online (or offline) with all the highlighting and notetaking tools you need to be successful in this course.

Table of Contents

Preface for Instructors

Note to Students

EVALUATING IDEAS: AN INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL READING

WRITING ABOUT IDEAS: AN INTRODUCTION TO RHETORIC

GOVERNMENT

Some Considerations about the Nature of Government

Lao-Tzu, Thoughts from the Tao-te Ching

Aristotle, Democracy and Oligarchy

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Qualities of the Prince

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Origin of Civil Society

Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence

Alexis de Tocqueville, Government by Democracy in America

*Ralph Waldo Emerson, Politics

Hannah Arendt, Total Domination

Benazir Bhutto, Islam and Democracy

Reflections on the Nature of Government

CULTURE 　　　

Some Considerations about the Nature of Culture

Mary Wollstonecraft, Of the Pernicious Effects Which Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society

*Jacob Riis, The Color Line in New York

Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare’s Sister

Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament

Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

*John Rawls, A Theory of Justice

Neil Postman, The Word Weavers/The World Makers

Judith Butler, from Undoing Gender

Reflections on the Nature of Culture

WEALTH

Some Considerations about the Nature of Wealth

Adam Smith, Of the Natural Progress of Opulence

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth

*John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire

Milton and Rose Friedman, Created Equal

*F. A. Hayek, Economic Control and Totalitarianism

Robert Reich, Why the Rich Are Getting Richer and the Poor Poorer

*Francis Fukuyama, The Middle Class and Democracy’s Future

Reflections on the Nature of Wealth

MIND 　　　　　　　　　　　

Some Considerations about the Nature of Mind

*Friedrich Nietzsche, Apollonianism and Dionysianism

Sigmund Freud, The Oedipus Complex

Carl Jung, The Personal and Collective Unconscious

Karen Horney, The Distrust between the Sexes

*Gilbert Ryle, The Ghost in the Machine

*Robert Nozick, Emotions

*Eric Kandel, The Problem of Consciousness

*Howard Gardner, Multiple Intelligences

Reflections on the Nature of Mind

SCIENCE

Some Considerations about the Nature of Science

Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

Francis Bacon, The Four Idols

Charles Darwin, Natural Selection

*Richard Feynman, The Value of Science

*Edward O. Wilson, What Is Science?

*Michio Kaku, The Theory of the Universe?

*Philip Kitcher, Inescapable Eugenics

*Lisa Randall, Newtonian Gravity and Special Relativity

Reflections on the Nature of Science

ETHICS

Some Considerations about the Nature of Ethics

Aristotle, The Aim of Man

*Hsun Tzu, Man’s Nature is Evil

Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Frederick Douglass, From the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

Iris Murdoch, Morality and Religion

Michael Gazzaniga, Toward a Universal Ethics

*Carol Gilligan, Concepts of Self and Morality

Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Case against Character

Reflections on the Nature of Ethics


* = New to this edition

Lee A. Jacobus

Lee A. Jacobus is professor emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut and the author/editor of popular English and drama textbooks, among them The Bedford Introduction to Drama and A World of Ideas. He has written scholarly books on Paradise Lost, on the works of John Cleveland, and on the works of Shakespeare, including Shakespeare and the Dialectic of Certainty. He is also a playwright and author of fiction. Two of his plays — Fair Warning and Long Division — were produced in New York by the American Theater of Actors, and Dance Therapy, three one-act plays, was produced in New York at Where Eagles Dare Theatre.  His book Hawaiian Tales: The Girl With Heavenly Eyes (TellMe Press 2014) is a collection of short stories set in Hawaii.

Instructor Resources

Need instructor resources for your course?

1. Sign in to unlock your resources.   |   2. Select your resources.  |   3. Submit a request.  |   4. Download your resources.

Unlock Your Resources

Instructor Resources

request locked icon

Instructor's Manual for A World of Ideas

Lee A. Jacobus | Tenth Edition | ©2017 | ISBN:9781319077617