SAN DIEGO GREAT BOOKS council

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ABOUT US

The San Diego Great Books Group [SDGreatBooks] has been meeting since 1980 to discuss readings of classic works of Philosophy, Imaginative literature, Science, Political Economy and History.  Without being doctrinaire, SDGB follows the University of Chicago Great Books Tradition of Shared Inquiry continued by Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins. To participate in our discussions you must have read the reading and be prepared to answer questions which the leader poses about the text. Visitors are welcome, of course. 

 

There is no lecture on the author or the reading.  We try to focus on the reading itself and not on outside sources. For more on how our meetings are run, please see the FAQs.

Next Meeting

 Sunday, June 2, 2013

Central San Diego Public Library

3rd Floor Commission Room 2—4 PM

Reading:  A Defence of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822)

 

This essay, written in 1821, is the first part of what was intended to be a three part work.  The remainder was never completed.  We will be discussing only a selection from the essay (paragraphs 1—13; 34—48).  Our selection concludes with the often quoted statement:  Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Our goal is to better understand these texts and to clarify differences in interpretation not necessarily to reach agreement. We believe these texts have meaning for today. If the Great Ideas interest you and the opportunity to learn through Shared Inquiry intrigues you, please join us.