A History of A History of Philosophy

As Gregory Peck once said of Sophia Loren, "That's a whole lot of book." Except for the book part, of course.

This morning--my 15th consecutive day of reading A History of Philosophy--I hit page 143. Which is not particularly impressive, especially considering that I still have 5,201 pages to go, but I'd already made the decision to go in for a pound . . . or, in this case, in for 8.7 pounds. Over six inches of book that I'm going to attempt to shove up my cosmic wazoo. Ouch. 

I'd originally intended to hold off and see if I had it in me to at least finish off the first volume before investing any more dollars, as all too often I have gone hog wild on a topic or an author and then pooped out before delicti-ing the corpus, but I'd been keeping my eye on the prices of the second and third omnibus editions at several online bookstores, and copies turned up that were so damned cheap that I didn't see the point in passing them by. So now I have the first 9 volumes (there are two additional slim-ish ones) in my possession. If I can hold to my 15 minutes per day pace, I will finish volume 9 about 2 years from now. That sounds okay. A hell of a lot faster than Jacqueline and I read Les Miserables, for sure. Or The Bible. 

In this morning's reading Copleston asserted that so far as we know, we have the complete works of Plato in our possession. That's the first time I'd ever heard that said, and it kind of blew me away. I mean, we have such a pittance of other early philosophers. I have to admit that after my first thought--"No shit?"--faded, my second thought was, "Maybe I should try to read the complete works of Plato." And I just checked on Amazon, and it's only like 760 pages, so virtually a lark. AND you can get a Kindle version for free. Whaaaaaat? So that happened. Don't know when I'll get to it, but sometimes you have to strike the iron before it freezes, right?

Speaking of freezing, I'm looking down this long road and it looks like it gets pretty breezy and chilly down there. Plenty of time to join up if'n you want to, knowhati'msayin?