St. John’s Reading List: A Great Books Curriculum

That said, reading alone misses the meat of “The Program” (always capitalized!) - it’s the searching, pointed, urgent discussion of a work with others who share a common language (from all having read and discussed the earlier works in the Program) that provoked deep thought and reflection, held me to account for intellectual rigor, and built up my faculty for critical thinking.

The reference is called out in the first book as Don Quixote’s horse. So it seems hard to miss unless you don’t know that Don Quixote is an old story.

⸻

1. There were a couple that I realized when I watched them that I had seen them, or at least parts of them when I was a kid, most notably Lawrence of Arabia. There were only a handful that felt like a burden to watch, and of those the only one I remember being bored silly by was Jules et Jim.

Perhaps I don't understand what "The information presented is for illustration purposes only and may not reflect the current reading list" means, and why one would link that page anyway.

I went through a great books curriculum (not in math), and this list reminds me of my primary complaint with the whole Great Books approach. "Great Books" is mired in fairly a ridiculous fetishism of the Greek classics, the Enlightenment era, the American founding, and the Anglo view of the western world.

This works... well enough... in Philosophy and History and the like. But it's a much larger problem in Mathematics where the field is essentially unrecognizable from the way it would've been taught in 1920 or whatever.

I really like the general approach, but the cultural baggage grates and for Mathematics in particular leads to odd selections. Sometimes you feel like your reading list is being commanded from the grave by a sort of snobby Oxbridge man who, in 1980, was already transparently classist in a kind of irrelevant and borderline senile way.

With respect to this list in particular, the critical points of the Grundlagenkrise are hardly covered at all despite having so many wonderful candidates for short illustrative texts that fit the Great Books tradition perfectly. Russell is predictably floating around (see paragraph 1) even though... well, yawn. And the emphasis on Physics and Natural Philosophy over the development of the science of computing is a shocking oversight given the sheer accessibility of the topic and its importance to the modern world. I'm honestly not sure what eg Darwin is doing in this list (despite being a good candidate in any great books curriculum).

Also, significantly more coverage of the development of arithemtic in the Arab world and simultaneous developments of various things in both the Indian subcontinent and in the far east. The Greek fetishism strikes hard in that first year; no one born after 1850 needs that much Euclid.

Where is the development of probability theory? Texts from Riemann, Boole, Laplace, Fermat, Galois, and especially Euler seem more important than Bacon or certainly Franklin.

Etc.

As far as finding books, places that sell used books often have these types of books for very inexpensive.

But, as you note, it'd probably be a terrible way to actually learn how to engineer software. More intellectually satisfying, though :)

> It's amusing that they have students read Pikkety's "Capital" before Marx's "Capital".

I get why it's amusing, but it also makes sense. Marx's "Capital" is kind of a beast. Pikkety's is written more-or-less toward a modern general audience. If I were sequencing these books in a student's intellectual development, Pikkety definitely comes before Marx.

My last math course was stats and business calc about 30 years ago.

I think what's under-appreciated is that, a fair amount of the time, for these sorts of enduring classics, reading the original is both better and easier than reading later takes on the same material. If you read the later derivative works and go back, often you'll find they've misinterpreted certain parts in strange ways, or left out things that seem important, and the original is not-uncommonly also both an easier and more entertaining read.

The monolithic, slow-to-change Great Books list that forms the core of the St John’s undergraduate Reading List is famously and self-consciously concerned primarily and narrowly with the Western intellectual tradition that informed the Founding Fathers, etc. - so as, in the creators’ thinking, to prepare graduates for citizenship in a liberal democracy.

It’s likely no one is more critical of the List than the students and faculty, who argue constantly over omissions, additions, and alterations (there is barely enough time to read all the works on the Program, so for each added, one must often be taken out).

The historical context of the creation of the Reading List accounts for its significant bias towards dead white cis men, as the creators of the list were themselves white cis men at a time when the American education system was not integrated.

(You may be pleased to hear that, for at least the last several decades, the college has admitted people of all colors and genders!)

1. It's 2 volumes, so not just one book

2. He wrote it with the help of 11 others

3. It's more of a reference manual than a book

4. It's keyed to 58 other books

All the same, The Syntopicon, I feel, is up there with the first Dictionary or Encyclopedia. A titanic effort that helps synthesize the world into a manageable tome.

Getting and being able to use a copy is honestly difficult.

But, dear Reader, worth it at any price. The depth and breadth is amazing and the way he links his 'great ideas' makes traversing the entire history of western thought easy, especially with modern tools.

It's obviously Adler's magnum opus and it shows.

If you'd like to grab a copy, let me know.

For that matter, St. John’s students self-select to be the kind of students who would appreciate being guided to discover the major themes. Most other students need to be told them and then think themes are pretentious puffery because they lack the life experience to recognize or appreciate them.

Isn't there a class instruction, supplementary reading, and discussion component for these books? I assume so.

But I think a lot of people — even freshmen! — could just read these books and get something from them anyway.

SJC grad here. The Program encourages you to encounter the works for yourself and see what _you_ think the themes/ideas are.

You’re lightly discouraged from reading the translator’s preface, since they share their own opinions. Different students bring different translations of the material, and additionally the language class that lasts all 4 years of undergrad is basically asking what translation is, is it possible.

Background: read both Iliad and odyssey in children's section of library in the 5th grade. Also read most of one of them in an honors philosophy class in college. Can't remember which. Recalled the scene where they were throwing Trojans off the walls after defeating the city when I made a hard tackle in rugby, driving my enemy into the ground.

Fun part of archinve.org is that they have a lot of copies of these books. I remember reading a copy of Rhetoric by Aristotle and it had a lot of marginalia. Turns out that it was a scan of John Adam's personal copy. It was pretty cool to read the thoughts and underlines of a founding father on such a foundational work.

That's just a load of edgy nonsense to get attention. Unfortunately, it seems to have worked.

But of course I’m biased because I’m deeply immersed in the classics—and I draw from it regularly. I find it troubling that people feel comfortable portraying classical civ as Nazi fodder…

Not much about Japanese horrors in WWII, Chinese imperialism, Mongol raids, African-originated slave traders, African tribal genocides, machismo anti-homosexual Latino culture either.

Just seems you forgot to mention these for some reason. Maybe because the culmination of 3000 years of Asian, Africa, and South American history isn't utopia either?

Nowadays, I think if someone argues along the lines of "3,000 years of Western culture culminated in the Holocaust," they should also consider that the same logic leads to "5,000 years of Chinese culture culminated in the ongoing genocides in Xinjiang and Tibet" or "1,400 years of Muslim culture culminated in 9/11" or any number of other such propositions that I think most thinking people can see are problematic. Those things happen in spite of, not because of, the broader cultural/intellectual canons.

Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, most college grads (let alone non-grads) from traditional programs that weren't poli-sci or philosophy would receive a better "citizen of the world" education from reading and understanding the first couple books of The Republic than they evidently picked up in 17 or more damn years of formal schooling.

They could literally exceed all that education in a lazy Sunday afternoon, because despite all those years they somehow failed to appreciate what the questions even are and that those questions aren't as easy to dismiss as many pop-understandings and pop-philosophies suggest, so they end up with these embarrassingly-bad ideas about it (and are often weirdly confident that they know it all!).

They're in exactly the same position as the targets of Socrates' "what is justice, actually?" question at the very damn beginning of the book, thinking they have a simple answer for the question and that their answer's more-or-less adequate. That's how far all that education got them. No-where, in other words.

Edit: I take it back. Apparently Navy is in the habit of losing the croquet match.