Welcome - Great Books and Classics

Welcome to Great Books and Classics
"The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism." - C.S. Lewis, On the Reading of Old Books

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Major Site Redesign - Phase II In Progress

Phase II of the site redesign - updating the site for better display on mobile devices - is now underway. If you access the site on a mobile device, or resize your browser to less than 900 pixels wide, you will see the main content expanded to fill most of the screen and no index visible. The index can be retrieved with a "Show Index" tab on the left edge, and re-hidden using a "Hide Index" tab at the top of the index.

I've tested the changes using my Android tablet with Opera, Firefox, and Chrome browsers. I don't have a smartphone or any Apple devices to test with, though, so if you access the site on an iPad or a smartphone and see any issues, please let me know about them so I can try to get them resolved.

The next part of Phase II is to separate the author information from the links for each work. So, the page for each author will contain a list of the author's works which are indexed on the site, along with basic information about the author and links to general information. The links to etexts and texts for purchase will be moved to their own, individual pages, instead of being crammed together on one page (this isn't a problem for, say, Tyrtaeus, but for Plato and Aristotle the pages get pretty long). You will probably see this change occur a few authors at a time.

UPDATE: This part may require a more in-depth redesign than I was originally planning and may not be completed until late 2018 or even later.

If you missed the initial announcement, the major changes in Phase I (now completed) were:

Index type, language of text, and reading list are now selected from dropdown menus instead of by links in the header
The menu block in the top right no longer lists webrings or options for navigation (both had been disabled anyway)
A couple of the URL parameters have changed (but don't worry - links and bookmarks using the old format will still work)

After Phase II, Phase III will involve changes intended to make the site easier for me to maintain and update in the future. These changes should be fairly transparent to visitors (except that the presentation of content will become more uniform), so I likely won't be announcing the start or completion of them.