While this is a good list of books, I find it hard to believe that a curriculum could cover them in any sort of detail. Imagine trying to cover Proust or Dante or Gibbon in the week or so you have until moving on to the next book. A little absurd
St. John’s Reading List: A Great Books Curriculum
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Re: St. John’s Reading List: A Great Books Curriculum
#72I'm all for learning more about the historical roots and overall development of Western culture, but one should keep in mind that the sheer amount of notable works that have been described as "classics" and "Great Books" is absolutely humongous; this list is of course highly selective and will necessarily be missing a lot of interesting stuff. In general, most people will probably want to focus on the narrower subtopics that specifically draw their interest, and perhaps explore the interconnections among works in that area.
Re: St. John’s Reading List: A Great Books Curriculum
#73Huh, this is neat. If you click on a book's subject(s), it will then take you to the specific topic and a reading list tailored to it. For example, this is their Mathematics reading list: https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/subjects... .
(edit: apparently these are just "books tagged mathematics", not the mathematics tutorial reading list. First and second paragraphs mostly hold) 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 A…
You're right that pre-20th c. math works were quite weird from a modern standpoint. The huge development of mathematical abstraction (and, to some extent, computation) since then has meant that many and perhaps most of the topics that research mathematicians were interested in back in the 19th c. would now be considered boring and sometimes trivial.
Re: St. John’s Reading List: A Great Books Curriculum
#74Okay but they’ll never beat Navy at ultimate frisbee.
Re: St. John’s Reading List: A Great Books Curriculum
#75A former partner of mine was a St. John's alum (and champion), so I heard a lot about and thought a lot about their undergraduate program. Of course this is a wonderful list of brilliant works. I don't know if reading nothing but primary sources is the most efficient way to become a critical thinker or knowledgeable (e.g. reading Euclid might be a treat for those who know geometry, but is it the ideal way to learn ge…
> There seems to be a decent selection of works reckoning with American slavery, which is good, but if I recall and AFAICT not much about European colonialism, the Holocaust, CIA-backed coups in South America, the horrors of Stalinism, rising Asian powers, the postmodern condition, any post-sexual revolution gender politics Not much about Japanese horrors in WWII, Chinese imperialism, Mongol raids, African-originated…
I certainly wouldn't imply that it is!
I think the read that you and some others are getting out of my post is that "the Western tradition is bad", which wasn't the intention - I repeatedly praised the works, after all! And to be fair there's lots of outspoken, stupid voices in the so-called culture wars that do say things like that, so I see why you might've made the assumption.
The point I was trying to make is that - contra to many prevailing modernist attitudes at the time - is that the Western tradition alone won't lead us to utopia, shield us from atrocities, make us enlightened and peaceful, bring us to The Blissful End of History. This is not to say that the Western tradition is bad; it's to say that it's still a work-in-progress, a thing to be interrogated and questioned, something we can look outside of; not a calcified list of hundreds-of-years-old Great Works which, upon reading, will automatically confer greatness.
Re: St. John’s Reading List: A Great Books Curriculum
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right, that view is "a little" dramatic. The Holocaust proposition was maybe more defensible 20 years ago when we could still look at Third World with rose-colored glasses. 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…
The notion that there exist, to any meaningful degree, philosophies or cultures that will not produce atrocities on a pretty regular schedule, is something a decent education ought to rid one of. Nazi Germany is what made it clear European civilization could incubate monsters? Absurd. Europe's entire history is one of atrocities. Hitler just applied what everyone else had been doing to Africa, to Europe—where and to…
> The notion that there exist, to any meaningful degree, philosophies or cultures that will not produce atrocities on a pretty regular schedule, is something a decent education ought to rid one of.
This is precisely what I'm saying, though. It was a predominant mood in the pre-war time that European society was enlightened and modern and superior to all others, and that this was a consequence of a Great History of Ideas starting from The Bible and Plato, finally coming to fruition in the then-present. It's absurd to believe these things about European civilization - or any known civilization! - but that's what people did.
I think it's clear by all the times I praised this "wonderful list of brilliant works", calling it "a great way to become cultured and a great way to spend four years", that I'm not trying to "indict" the Western tradition. There's a vast gulf between arguing that "deeply fetishizing [it] is problematic" and condemning it outright.
Re: St. John’s Reading List: A Great Books Curriculum
#77It's an interesting approach. They do like the classic sources. I've at least skimmed more than half of those titles, long after college. It's amusing that they have students read Pikkety's "Capital" before Marx's "Capital". You don't want to learn geometry from Euclid. You read Euclid after you already know geometry, to see how he built it up. Similarly, you don't want to learn calculus from Newton. Or physics from…
Is Euclid just about geometry? I have not read it, but others have written it is a good introduction to mathematical proofs. A few comments on HN over the years said Hammack's "Book Of Proof" or Velleman's "How To Prove It" are more thorough, but are intended for 3rd/4th year math undergrad, and Euclid is easier to get through.
My last math course was stats and business calc about 30 years ago.
Re: St. John’s Reading List: A Great Books Curriculum
#78Was a little disappointed to see so little from the east in terms of recommended books. The Bhagavad Gita and ZhuangXi made the list, but nothing in terms of other important works by the Buddha, or Yoga or the epics like the Mahabharata.
If someone were to read some of the Upanishadic works, it would be really interesting to see their influence on the works of Plotinus, etc.
Re: St. John’s Reading List: A Great Books Curriculum
#79Not an alum, but in an effort to improve my written and spoken english, I picked up the list and read the about 80% of the content. I was kind to myself and skipped any book that I absolutely found a slog (there were only a few, Aristotle's metaphysics and some early of the dark age Christian philosophy). The book list is really good at telling you to skip the really irrelevant bits of ancient books. I found that rea…
RE 3: as an SJC alum, I found my reading speed slowed drastically both during and after four years spent reading and discussing these books. I found myself thinking while reading more often, making more connections within and between works.
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.
Re: St. John’s Reading List: A Great Books Curriculum
#80A co-worker's son visited St. John's, since it was one he was considering, and it was sufficiently interesting that he mentioned it when we were discussing education in general.
I looked up the reading list, and have been reading the texts, trying to patch up my rather spotty education --- it also makes me wonder how many of these texts would have been a part of Edmund Dante's (from _The Count of Monte Cristo_) education:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams...
I wish that there was better accessibility of the texts --- a lot of them are not on Librivox, and not all are on Project Gutenberg either.
One notable example of technology aiding accessibility of a text though is "Joyce's Java version" of Euclid's _Elements_:
https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm...
and one can't help but wonder what other texts could be better presented using modern technology.