For example, this is their Mathematics reading list: https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/subjects....
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.
As someone who has learned and taught a lot of math, I agree with that claim.
I doubt the distinction matters at all for the vast majority of grads, especially ones who don't intend to become mathematicians. Learning how to math is probably more important than the specific material, outside a handful of things. You can pick up the rest as-needed, and for the vast majority of people, "the rest" that is in fact ever needed for the entire rest of their lives, will be very little. Especially if they're pursuing a classics-based liberal arts degree.
I doubt many of their grads are planning to become actual computer-scientists or mathematicians or mech. engineers or any of that. Lawyer, maybe doctor, maybe writer, maybe an ordinary computer programmer, that sort of thing. As long as you're not afraid of math, you'll be fine in any of those not having had a typical PDE class or whatever.
On the third hand, reading Newton is a really bad way to learn calculus; the college uses a lab manual which more closely resembles a modern calculus course.
That said, i haven't read most of these, so maybe i am wrong.
Word problems are the last edifice of natural philosophy in the high school mathematics curriculum and there’s constant pressure to remove those as well.
If "thinking mathematically" is the actual, vital part of that education, for most students, I have some doubts that a classics-based approach is any worse than the modern kind. Maybe better, except for a small slice of students who will continue to engage with advanced mathematics after they finish undergrad and do need the modern version.
So maybe it's not a bad thing that people graduate from College are required to take a few algebra and stats classes when they're ostensibly running the show at large corporations and in various levels of Government.
Kinda had to gently remind them that the physics they knew wouldn’t help them with ontological problems like “what is an object?” but once they got over that hurdle everything was pretty much fine.
I didn't read the OP and can't vouch for it. the curriculum I got was almost entirely Euclid, plus a little bit of Greek stuff about arcs and sections, which I imagine was Nicomachus per the above comment, and there may have been some stuff about astronomy as well.
but reading Euclid, and doing an entire year of math that doesn't even have numbers until the very end, which was early number theory: just incredible.
I got bored, though, and the later years of the curriculum skew very hard towards European philosophers. the longer you stay there, the more you become justified in summarizing it as a philosophy degree for the sake of convenience.
For me, the three-decade interval gave me work and life experience which prepared me to read and discuss the Great Books. (The graduate program's list is similar to the undergraduate list, if a bit shorter.) The authors and works we read at St. Johns come from a wide range of contexts with different assumptions than ours, which made them both such a challenge and a reward to study.
There are other "Great Books" programs, including The Catherine Project, https://catherineproject.org/, which give opportunities to read and discuss many of these important works.
Math -- without math class at St. Johns I don't think I'd have ever thought I could be a programmer, much less that I could learn it on my own from books and online self-study. I still don't know much about math-as-math, but having a class dedicated to studying proofs and formal logic in various forms and communicating that to a group has been extremely valuable to me in my professional life. So I'm somewhat of a patriot for the math program.
That said, I think the poster in this thread who argues it's "a bad way to learn math" is correct. The St. John's program was founded in 1937, and, let's face it, the world of math and science is different now. If you sat me down next to a math major and made both us do a math test, they'd massacre me.
I'm more critical of the lab program. It felt like a complicated review of high school physics, chemistry, and biology and it was the area where the "amateur" nature of the teaching often hurt, rather than enhanced, the lesson. My thoughts about "the world's moved on since 1937" are even more acute related to lab. I don't feel I was very literate in science after I graduated beyond being able to talk about the Maxwell equations or relativity with some confidence.
Language class is a mixed bag. It's meant to support seminar by giving you access to Greek (and in junior and senior year, French) so that you can dig into some of the original sources. I enjoyed and was good at it -- but it's two years of college French that may make you able to read French literature but unable to order a meal in Paris.
When it comes to the seminar class, I enthusiastically endorse the St. John's method. I don't think there is a better way to read philosophy, history, literature, politics, etc.
Unrelated to the subjects themselves: at the very least, you're spending four years with roughly the same class of <100 people, reading the same texts, doing the same intellectual work, exposing your thoughts in class, living in the same area, eating in the same dining hall. That kind of -- let's call it intimacy -- means you're going to make some pretty deep friendships and rivalries and learn some social skills about getting on in group settings.
Would I recommend it? It's not for everyone. For people who don't need their hand held and who like the idea of reading and talking about a bunch of important books that discuss a lot of important questions in life, I think it's very right. For people who want to prepare for a specific technical career, or who are very shy, or who are not intellectuals by nature, I don't think it's right at all.
Agree on Descartes and Darwin, but they're both sort of canonical in Great Books reading lists. Honestly not sure why Descartes is considered so important to the history of ideas, particularly in Mathematics where there are so many other very worthy minds and texts to study, but shrugs.
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.
I don't recall if it addresses math in particular, however. my guess is no. the grad school is kind of eager about granting people excuses to skip math, and I get the impression that they have to be, because otherwise they'd go out of business.
anyway, if you did both that degree and the undergraduate degree, you could claim a more credible, globe-spanning Great Books education, although it would still have plenty of caveats and flaws.
Also the point of reading Euclid is not really to learn geometry but rather to investigate and examine the oldest, most primordial expression of the idea that math should be formalized using a few axioms.
I always got the impression SJ is more about an “originalism” towards knowledge. But of course they’re going to have to pick and choose. Maybe it’s time for them to revisit math and add computing.
Edit-read the math curriculum. They threw Darwin, Feynman, and Einstein into there as electives. Seems a little of a catch-all. Also they could add Shannon entropy.
> Also the point of reading Euclid is not really to learn geometry but rather to investigate and examine the oldest, most primordial expression of the idea that math should be formalized using a few axioms.
Yeah, Euclid is important. It should be studied carefully in any Great Books program. But there's a lot of other important stuff to talk about and the extreme emphasis on Euclidean constructions is IMO a bit of a shibboleth.
The webpage clearly states that the list is of foundational books of greco-roman civilization. And SJC is an american university. What do you expect?
Also, fetishism? Greek classics are the foundation of european civilization. That's like going to a christian seminary and whining about their fetishism of the bible.
> 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.
The foundation of european mathematics goes back to the ancient greeks. It's a foundational books list.
> Russell is predictably floating around (see paragraph 1) even though... well, yawn.
Are you serious?
Anyways. Even then -- typical Great Books curricula still sample from a tiny subset of literature that fits the mold of "greco-roman civilization". It was chosen by a very particular set of people at a very particular point in time. Some choices work more or less well enough. Others not so much.
The choices for what to emphasize in Natural Philosophy and Mathematics are mostly bad imo. They reflect what a 1920s humanist might conceive of as a Great Book in those fields. Which is to say, mostly weird and sort of mired in a very particular 1850s Oxbridge sensibility that most people don't even realize is being read into the whole project.
And here's the issue: those guys had well-informed opinions on what to emphasize in Philosophy and History. We can agree to disagree, or not, whatever. But in Mathematics and Science, they were barely following the plot or even already ossified in their own lifetimes. And that was a century ago. The choices there aren't a matter of opinion. They are just... bad.
>> > Russell... yawn
> Are you serious?
First of all, the text listed is his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. It's literally a 1920s textbook on Mathematical Philosophy. It is what it is. Doesn't really belong in a Great Books curriculum, imo, but the indignation at the idea that it's a yawnfest (too verbose) is kinda weird. It's... a textbook. Yawn.
Second, the indignation at Russell being a yawnfest in general made me LOL. Principia Mathematica is WAY less readable than the yellow pages.
Third, if you're including Russell as part of your coverage of Foundations -- but also excluding Goedel and Church and Turing and Hilbert -- then you're doing it horribly wrong! Russell is the foil in this plot, and a horribly pedantic and boring one at that. Not that a Great Books curriculum would ever treat Russell as a foil ;-)
Fourth, to the stuff you probably assumed was being included from Russell: I also found Russell's History boring and at some moments annoyingly preachy/opinionated for a History. Even his more red meat-y opinion stuff is... important for understanding the development of a certain strand of modern intellectualism. That's not meant to be dismissive; I'm in that strand!!! But let's just say not what I'd spend my best years pouring over.