You can talk up the useful purposes of summaries. First, it might be useful to think over whether (if a student is going to do the reading) summaries might actually be helpful, especially for dense and jargon-rich texts. Others are welcome to submit their own summaries on the site, and critical feedback on the summaries is welcome. You can follow Philosophy Summaries on Facebook to receive updates about new entries.įor what it’s worth, I think it is useful to confront the Sparknotes phenomenon up front by incorporating it into class. That way you can quickly get or recall the general gist of a book, then drill down to find particular parts that might be of interest.įor an example, here’s his entry on Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics. On the website, these are hierarchically organized – you can “expand” or “zoom into” a book to see its chapters, and so on. As I read a book, I write a brief summary of what each section is arguing or doing, then use these to summarize each chapter and then the whole book. Philosophy books are usually divided into chapters, which are divided into sections.

It features “hierarchical summaries” of philosophy texts with an interface that allows you to drill down into the summaries of each section. Since then, his popularity has only grown: Candide is still the most widely taught work of French literature in the world.Alexander Dietz, a graduate student at the University of Southern California, has been working on a project called Philosophy Summaries. The French Revolution, still to come, was the ultimate culmination of the Enlightenment thinking of which Voltaire was a part. By the time of his death in 1778, France had embraced Voltaire as a national hero. This earned him many enemies, especially in the government as well as in the religious establishment, which was dominated by the Jesuits. When he returned to France, he dedicated himself to fighting “hydras and superstition,” with his philosophical and satirical writings. Voltaire's time in England introduced him to Newtonian science and other radical intellectual ideas of the time. There, he stayed at the estate of Lord Bolingbroke, in whose circle he met the writers Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, and others. For one long period starting in 1726, he exiled himself to England to escape from prosecution for defamation. Voltaire's writing got him into trouble many times in his life. Establishing himself in literary circles, he debuted in 1718 with the publication of the tragedy Oedipe. Though his father wanted him to find a position of power in public life, Voltaire defied him by becoming a writer.

François-Marie Arouet was born in 1694 to an elite family well placed in the French royal bureaucracy.

Candide cliff notes