Great Books

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Great Books refers to a curriculum and a book list. Mortimer Adler lists three criteria for including a book on the list:

the book has contemporary significance; that is, it has relevance to the problems and issues of our times;
the book is inexhaustible; it can be read again and again with benefit; and
the book is relevant to a large number of the great ideas and great issues that have occupied the minds of thinking individuals for the last 25 centuries.

--(Adler, "Second Look", pg 142)

1 Genesis
2 Program
3 Series
4 Example list
- 4.1 Television
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Genesis

It came about as the result of a discussion among American academics and educators, starting in the 1920s and 1930s and begun by Prof. John Erskine of Columbia University, about how to improve the higher education system by returning it to the western liberal arts tradition of broad cross-disciplinary learning. These academics and educators included Robert Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, and Alexander Meiklejohn. The view among them was that the emphasis on narrow specialization in American colleges had harmed the quality of higher education by failing to expose students to the important products of Western civilization and thought.

Many of those involved with the Great Books curriculum had a populist agenda, stemming from their backgrounds in the Socialist movement. They were at odds both with much of the existing educational establishment and with contemporary educational theory. Educational theorists like Sidney Hook and John Dewey (see pragmatism) disagreed with the premise that there was crossover in education (e.g, that a study of philosophy, formal logic, or rhetoric could be of use in medicine or economics).

Great Books started out as a list of 100 essential primary source texts considered to constitute the Western Canon. This list was always intended to be tentative, although many critics considered it presumptuous and laughable to nominate 100 Great Books to the exclusion of all others.

[edit] Program

The Great Books Program is a curriculum that makes use of this list of texts. The undergraduate program as implemented at St. John's College involves a four-year set course of studies consisting of four classes:

Science— Natural science from Aristotle to Einstein
Mathematics— from Euclid to Einstein
Language— Translation of Greek and French texts and study of poetry
Seminar--Twice-weekly two-hour discussion of a work of philosophy or literature

As much as possible, students rely on primary sources. They are encouraged to conduct classes themselves, with guidance from a tutor.

In 1919, Professor Erskine taught the first course based on the "great books" program, titled "General Honors," at Columbia University. Erskine left for the University of Chicago in the 1920's, and helped mold its core curriculum. It initially failed, however, shortly after its introduction due to fallings-out between the instructors over the best ways to conduct classes and due to concerns about the rigor of the courses. However, to this day, both Chicago and Columbia maintain required core curricula heavily focused on the "great books" of the Western Canon. Several schools maintain a Great Books Program as an option for students, but the some of the most prominent schools are the University of Notre Dame, St. John's College sister schools, Thomas Aquinas College, and the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University.

[edit] Series

Main article: Great Books of the Western World

The Great Books of the Western World is a hardcover encyclopedia-style collection of the books on the Great Books list. The series is familiar to many Americans. The books are licensed by Mortimer Adler and others through the Great Books Foundation, and many of the books in this collection were translated into English for the first time. The Integral Liberal Arts program at Saint Mary's College of California (Moraga) is based on the St. John's program and is considered "a college within a college" at Saint Mary's.

[edit] Example list

Any recommended set of great books are expected to change with the times, as reflected in the following statement by Robert Hutchins from the Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1954.

"In the course of history... new books have been written that have won their place in the list. Books once thought entitled to belong to it have been superseded; and this process of change will continue as long as men can think and write. It is the task of every generation to reassess the tradition in which it lives, to discard what it cannot use, and to bring into context with the distant and intermediate past the most recent contributions to the Great Conversation."

The following is an example list from How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. (1940, 1972)

Homer: Iliad, Odyssey
The Old Testament
Aeschylus: Tragedies
Sophocles: Tragedies
Herodotus: History
Euripides: Tragedies
Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
Hippocrates: Medical Writings
Aristophanes: Comedies
Plato: Dialogues
Aristotle: Works
Epicurus: 'Letter to Herodotus';'Letter to Menoecus'
Euclid: Elements
Archimedes: Works
Apollonius: Conic Sections
Cicero: Works
Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
Virgil: Works
Horace: Works
Livy: History of Rome
Ovid: Works
Plutarch: Parallel Lives; Moralia
Tacitus: Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania
Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic
Epictetus: Discourses; Encheiridion
Ptolemy: Almagest
Lucian: Works
Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
Galen: On the Natural Faculties
The New Testament
Plotinus: The Enneads
St. Augustine: On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
The Song of Roland
The Nibelungenlied
The Saga of Burnt Njál
St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica
Dante Alighieri: The New Life; On Monarchy; The Divine Comedy
Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks
Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
Desiderius Erasmus: The Praise of Folly
Nicolaus Copernicus: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
Thomas More: Utopia
Martin Luther: Table Talk; Three Treatises
Francois Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel
John Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion
Michel de Montaigne: Essays
William Gilbert: On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
Edmund Spenser: Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
Francis Bacon: Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis
William Shakespeare: Poetry and Plays
Galileo Galilei: The Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
Johannes Kepler: Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
William Harvey: On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
Thomas Hobbes: The Leviathan
Rene Descartes: Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
John Milton: Works
Moliere: Comedies
Blaise Pascal: The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises
Christiaan Huygens: Treatise on Light
Benedict de Spinoza: Ethics
John Locke: Letter Concerning Toleration; 'Of Civil Government'; Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Thoughts Concerning Education
Jean Baptiste Racine: Tragedies
Isaac Newton: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding; Monadology
Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
Jonathan Swift: A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
William Congreve: The Way of the World
George Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge
Alexander Pope: Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man
Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws
Voltaire: Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
Samuel Johnson: The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets
David Hume: Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile, The Social Contract
Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
James Boswell: Journal Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier: Elements of Chemistry
Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison: Federalist Papers
Jeremy Bentham: Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust; Poetry and Truth
Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier: Analytical Theory of Heat
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
William Wordsworth: Poems
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems; Biographia Literaria
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice; Emma
Karl von Clausewitz: On War
Stendhal: The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
Lord Byron: Don Juan
Arthur Schopenhauer: Studies in Pessimism
Michael Faraday: Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology
Auguste Comte: The Positive Philosophy
Honore de Balzac: Pere Goriot; Eugenie Grandet
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men; Essays; Journal
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
John Stuart Mill: A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
Charles Dickens: Works
Claude Bernard: Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
Henry David Thoreau: Civil Disobedience; Walden
Karl Marx: Capital
George Eliot: Adam Bede; Middlemarch
Herman Melville: Moby Dick; Billy Budd
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary; Three Stories
Henrik Ibsen: Plays
Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger
William James: The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragamatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism
Henry James: The American; The Ambassadors
Machado de Assis: Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas; Dom Casmurro; Quincas Borba; O Alienista
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power
Jules Henri Poincare: Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method
Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
George Bernard Shaw: Plays and Prefaces
Max Planck: Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
Henri Bergson: Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
John Dewey: How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic; the Theory of Inquiry
Alfred North Whitehead:. An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
George Santayana: The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places
Lenin: The State and Revolution
Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past
Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy; The Analsysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits
Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
Albert Einstein: The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
James Joyce: 'The Dead' in Dubliners; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
Jacques Maritain: Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism
Franz Kafka: The Trial; The Castle
Arnold J. Toynbee: A Study of History; Civilization on Trial
Jean Paul Sartre: Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The First Circle; The Cancer Ward

[edit] Television

In 1993 and 1994, the Learning Channel did a series of one hour shows discussing many of the great books of history and their impact on the world. It was narrated by Donald Sutherland. They also did a show on The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, (narrated by James Belushi), which influenced the way food is approved of for consumption in the USA.