ITT: books that give a good overview of the significant thinkers and ideas of western civilization

It's a decent overview of what Bloom thinks of his subjects, but he's a little limited. He's enjoyable enough, but Auerbach's Mimesis, Abrams's Mirror and the Lamp, Moore's The Novel, Wilkie and Hurt's Literature of the Western World, and Gottlieb's Dream of Reason (for philosophy) are probably more expansive.

lol bloom is good, he's a very gnostic jew, most right wing people i know that are woke to jews still like bloom b/c there are exceptions to every rule. but if u wanna ignore his rlly good criticism you are welcome to shoot yrself in the foot you fucking purity-testing retards
i mean for gods sake bloom is one of the only people defending western civ

Interesting that the anti-Bloom /pol/posters always seem to space their posts like a retard

So what does Harold Bloom have to do with this?

So what does Harold Bloom have to do with this?

Cross-posting this, since there is clearly a Stormfag spammer making the rounds right now, and I much prefer my form of irrationalism.

>tfw οἱ πολλοί continue their trudge through the noxious swamps of political theory, now on the left foot and now on the right, their eyes fixed down on the impure bog and never thinking to look up to the stars, yet ineffectual to change their drudgery in any ways; their eyes may wander unto the next object of passing lust, but their feet and hands are fettered
>tfw οἱ σοφοί exalt, as they have from eternity, Solitary Man over all else, disdaining everything that would seek to constrain Him with mere convention, whether that convention be old or new
>tfw most of all I detest that love of pain and death for its own sake embodied equally in the intolerant Spartan, in the fascist, and in the white-collar disciple of Greenspan; because they all love to see division among mankind (between the freeman and the Helot, the "Aryan" and the Jew, the entrepreneurial man and the freeloader, and indeed between the truly tolerant citizen and the secret bigot), not along the lines of real worth, but according to base tribal instincts
>tfw, though Heraclitus was right to say that one man is worth ten thousand if he be one of the best, bloodshed is unnecessary, as all but the starkest enforcers of convention have the potential to become one of τῶν σοφῶν, if they could only get a proper education
>tfw you realize the physical accommodation for leisure brought about by what we call Modernity, for all the difficulties it presents for the preservation of the integrity of Solitary Man, is the only means by which the way can be prepared for such an education; but that, insomuch as Modernity brings in new conventions, by so much must it be destroyed; as mere Convention, whether old or new, is always barbarous and the enemy of real Tolerance and Sensibility

Also as far as I can tell, no such page exists on the JIDF website. It hasn't been updated since 2015 anyways. And it seems they're really more about harassing Palestinian liberation people. Which is stupid, but still.

...

>significant thinkers and ideas
>no scientists, mathematicians or engineers

You're barking up the wrong tree if you're turning to playwrights, philosophers, poets, priests and novelists for significant thoughts.

>engineers
At that pint you might as well include businessmen. Or at the very least theorists like Taylor.

definitely don't read this, I picked up some of bloom's stuff but he's totally incoherent and up his own ass, he might be one of the most pretentious people of all time. in any case it's not really written as an introductory text, you probably have to already be pretty erudite to get anything out of it

>engineers
>contributing ideas

lel

Looking for more alternative suggestions lads

Yeah, I guess computers and cars aren't really big contributions...

>computers
Most hardware from vacuum tubes to transistors and HDDs were developed primarily by physicists. CS and SE started out purely as applied math pioneered by Turing and von Neumann.
>cars
Effort of tens of thousands of different engineers and minuscule step-by-step improvements, which can hardly be called "greatest ideas of civilization".

There's no need to be triggered, CAD-monkey. Accept your place in the foodchain and keep on brainletneering.

>Western Civilization

never has there been a bigger spook

Said the nonwhite who isn't a part of it.

Scientists, mathematicians and engineers are philosophers.

When people say that there is no such thing as western civilisation what they actually mean is that: there is civilisation, and non-western civilisation.

Dostoyevsky and Wittgenstein were engineers user

If your race is so superior, then how come you're spending your time defending some shit ideology on an Indonesian Papyrus Hieroglyphics forum?

It's definitely worth a read OP. But it's much more concerned with aesthetics and "culture" than thinkers and ideas, as you put it. It's also Bloom's own framework of the most important literary figures, so not all that objective. Pic related might be more what you're looking for.

Read the bible also.

>Opposes multiculturalism
>Dismisses feminist and marxist schools of thought
Bloom defends western civilization more fervently than 99% of contemporary white thinkers. Imagine being this deluded.

>Thinking that Western literature is the literature of a single homogeneous racial group
>Dismissing one of the few contemporaries academics that is actually defending our institutions because he's a jooooo
Kys

western philosophy by anthony kenny. don't read the bertrand russell book, or any bertrand russell books for that matter

Not really. Harold Bloom is a great critic and probably the smartest guy in the liberal arts world. He's not very insightful, though, because his rhetoric is very poor. I enjoy reading him, but I don't get much of anything out of it.

this any good?

>Bertrand Russell's history of philosophy
4/10. Whig garbage.

I got you OP, pic related is Otto Carpeaux's History of the western Literature

>written by an austrian that spoke and read in German, Italian, French, Portuguese, English, Ancient Greek, Latim, Spanish, Flemish and others
>studied not only literature, but also math, philosophy, sociology, music and chemistry
>met Kafka in real life
>the book goes from the greeks until the first half of the XX century and passes through all literary movements
>its free to get on the internet

but its written in portuguese

...

>written by an Austrian that spoke and read in German, Italian, French, Portuguese, English, Ancient Greek, Latin, Spanish, Flemish and others

>writes his magnum opus in Portuguese

anglos BTFO

I guess, The Lusiads is fantastic

It's on my to read list.

>xylophone core books
no thanks

ty almost forgot what a xylophone looked like

you're welcome friend

>umberto eco
nice charlatan

cosmoetica.com/d1-des1.htm

Barzun is awesome.

>naive realism
Hmm, tasty bait.

I'm with you, that book is all one needs to understand the whole history of philosophy. It is unmatched. I'm guessing the people shitting on it haven't read it, or flipped through a couple pages with a predetermined shitty mindset because Berty shat on their oppressive and dumbed down tradition one too many times. Discount their views folks. This book is gold.

yeah science and mathematics is like totally realistically naive bro and it's also basically reddit ahah I bet scientist don't even read Plato and feyerband or whatever his name is

cosmoetica.com/b308-des248.htm

>cosmoetica.com/b308-des248.htm

I just picked up this book from the library last week as something to read during my insufferable macroeconomics lecture. I went right back to taking diligent notes after the first few pages. I haven't gotten more than 40 pages in since, for all the same reasons this review outlines.

The writing style is lazy, unedited, abrupt, and juvenile. I can usually ignore this so long as the text compensates with insight or substance, but I regret to say that it is woefully lacking in both those areas.

I skimmed through the book to see how he covers some notable figures: Shakespeare, and Victorian literature and historians like Macaulay. Even after the bitter impression I got from the first few pages, I was genuinely surprised to find the section on Shakespeare, not where you would expect it to be in the 16th, but rather at the beginning of the 19th...

What a strange review, Barzun is explicitly writing a cultural history. To contrast him with GG&S is meaningless.

As for the style, I like it, but de gustibus...