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

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

#101

Post by alephnerd »

thwayunion wrote: post #57
Animats wrote: post #54

It'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…

Those are excellent suggestions. I think we are probably at the point where you could do a Great Books curriculum in Computer Science. Would be interesting to put together that list: 10-20 foundational primary texts in Algorithms, Programming/Software Engineering, Logic, AI, and Computer Architecture. But, as you note, it'd probably be a terrible way to actually learn how to engineer software. More intellectually sat…

There is an undergrad elective course exactly like that for computing at Harvard. It was one of the CS91r's from a couple years ago.

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

#102

Post by a_techwriter_00 »

dabiged wrote: post #95
voisin wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long did it take you to read them? Did you read them in order as presented? Did you start with a strategy for retention or comprehension (especially with the non-modern English) so that it wouldn’t be wasted time?

From start to finish it probably took around 7-8 years. The booklist I had, started out pretty easy going (i.e. you were expected to read The Illiad in about 2 weeks), towards the fourth year it is frankly delusional how fast you are expected to read (War and Peace was assigned 1 week) and I have NO idea how the students in the course can do it. I was reading maybe 2 hrs a day whilst working fulltime. Yes I read them…

I forget if War and Peace was the first book of a semester or whether it was over spring break, but long novels were typically scheduled so that you had some free time away to read them.

The books me and my friends found to be ass-kickers were the dense philosophy books with many seminars back-to-back, like how there were seven? on Critique of Pure Reason and six? on Phenomenology of the Spirit. Important books, to be sure, but there's a limit to endurance.

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

#103

Post by a_techwriter_00 »

manesioz wrote: post #99

Remarkably missing many works of Christian theology... No St. Augustine, Aquinas, St. John of Chrysostom, Calvin, etc.

Confessions is on the program Sophomore year, as are excerpts from Summa Theologica. I vaguely remember one of the differences between the campuses being that Annapolis students read some Calvin and Santa Fe students read something else, but I don't remember what it was.

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

#104

Post by dinkleberg »

WillAdams wrote: post #80

A 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_) educa…

I love that idea about what Dantes would have read. Many of these books that have stood the test of time have been a part of western classic education for a significant period of time, so it would make sense. Though I imagine most of it would’ve been conveyed to him orally by the Abbé.

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

#105

Post by dinkleberg »

aug_aug wrote: post #39

I look at this list, especially the "Freshman" list, and feel like public school really let me down, lol.

Same. If I could do it over again, I’d much rather go through a program like this than the engineering program I went through. Nothing I learned is relevant to world of software (even the software classes I took lol). I’ve had to go through all the classical liberal arts education knowledge through my own independent study.

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

#106

Post by thwayunion »

34611 wrote: post #90
thwayunion wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

> "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. 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 ch…

Yeah, yeah, Evropean, we get it. You know that even SJC grads eye-roll at that stuff, right? One of them even does in this comment section.

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.

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

#107

Post by thwayunion »

voldacar wrote: post #89
thwayunion wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

Computing is not yet old enough for us to know which books on computing are great books. 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.

It is a living field, of course, but I do think there are certain texts that we know we would include from Turing, Von Neumann, Goedel, Church, Shannon, Backus, Hoare, Dijkstra, and I guess something about Perceptrons is now mandatory but IDK what text I'd choose. Beyond those texts things become hazier, but that's already at least a semester of undergraduate reading.

> 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.

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

#108

Post by dhosek »

dabiged wrote: post #63

Not 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…

On item 2, I did a project back in the 00s where I watched every movie I’d never seen¹ in the imdb top 500 (Netflix DVD and the library were a great resource for getting through this). It was great background for catching jokes that I’d missed on The Simpsons. Cultural literacy is a widely varied thing.

⸻

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.

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

#109

Post by dhosek »

It’s a bit better than I expected although it does seem odd that everything in the first two years is very Eurocentric. It’s only in the third year are students exposed to anything by Asian authors (and there’s some cheating there in that the Dao de jing is listed twice—no, wait, three times!) and those are all under the category of elective works.

I’m frankly unconvinced of the value of reading historical works of science or mathematics, especially those written before modern notation came into usage—without additional explicatory apparatus, the text would be exceptionally opaque.

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

#110

Post by EFreethought »

wheelinsupial wrote: post #86
EFreethought wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you looking for a book to learn proofs from? Are you looking to learn any math topics in particular? I think you can go through any of the books you listed and get an understanding of proofs. The proofs books usually use basic number theory or set theory for examples because the point is to learn the logic and structure of proofs. (If the book isn't enough for you, you can use Khan Academy as a refresher.) Learni…

WRT math topics: probably Calculus and linear algebra.

I will look into the proofs book you recommended. Thanks.

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