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)
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.
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.
Series
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.
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:
- 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
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.
See also
- Shimer College
- St. John's College, U.S.
- Harrison Middleton University
- Educational perennialism
- The Jolly Roger
External links
- Alan Nicoll's Great Books of the Western World
- Bicycle Diaries's You are what you read
- Culture Wars and the Great Conversation (@pbs.org) by Ron Dorfman
- The Great Books Foundation
- Saint Mary's College of California
- St Thomas University's Great Ideas Programme
- Thomas Aquinas College Santa Paula
- University of King's College (Halifax) - Foundation Year Programme
- Victory Classical Tutorials Bringing the Great books into a world online.
- Western Canon Great Books University