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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

#141

Post by Balgair »

jrdunson wrote: post #132

Mortimer J. Adler mentions in his books... that at Saint John’s, the students were learning how to read well, and analyze arguments well. At one point in his career, he did a speaking tour, presenting at several college campuses – he was really impressed how the students from St. John's were able to analyze his arguments well, ask in-depth questions related to his material, even challenge him on some points. He has t…

I'll add The Syntopicon as a really good book that Adler wrote (kinda).

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.

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

#142

Post by Balgair »

briga wrote: post #71

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

Per what I have heard from graduates, they agree that the pace is fast, but that you get used to it.

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

#143

Post by Balgair »

amykhar wrote: post #22

I love this. Of course I'm reminded of Good Will Hunting and want to break out my library card and get this expensive education on a budget.

I think all of books on the list is on archive.org

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.

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

#144

Post by wheelinsupial »

EFreethought wrote: post #119
wheelinsupial wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can take four terms of calculus using the Stewart book and not need to do any proofs. You do need to review algebra and have a good grounding in that, though. You can also cover linear algebra without proofs. There are, of course, books that do cover proofs for calculus and linear algebra, but it depends on what you’re trying to get out of the material.

I have heard that proofs are a big part of advanced math, so that is one reason I am interested in proofs. I should have listed proofs as a third topic.

You're right it is a big part of advanced math, but you can cover calculus, linear algebra, and proofs in parallel! If you have enough time.

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

#145

Post by WillAdams »

dinkleberg wrote: post #104
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.

Yes, the Abb\'e would have memorized the books in question, and communicated them orally, paper and ink being used for the book which he himself was writing (and which was later found by Edmund).

Anyway, books which list books have been a fascination of mine since first reading _The Count of Monte Cristo_ (really enjoyed Louis L'Amour's _Education of a Wandering Man_, as well as Holly Ordway's _Tolkien's Modern Reading_).

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

#146

Post by WillAdams »

troupe wrote: post #133
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…

You might also like this version of Elements: https://www.c82.net/euclid/ As far as finding books, places that sell used books often have these types of books for very inexpensive.

Nice!

Looking forward to reading this.

It would be great to have a list of such books/topics which have been re-presented in improved versions.

The wonderful physics text:

https://www.motionmountain.net/

is an excellent example of this.

A more prosaic example is this presentation as PDFs of Bertrand Russell's _The Principles of Mathematics_:

https://people.umass.edu/klement/pom/

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

#147

Post by gorgonical »

Balgair wrote: post #141
jrdunson wrote: post #132

Mortimer J. Adler mentions in his books... that at Saint John’s, the students were learning how to read well, and analyze arguments well. At one point in his career, he did a speaking tour, presenting at several college campuses – he was really impressed how the students from St. John's were able to analyze his arguments well, ask in-depth questions related to his material, even challenge him on some points. He has t…

I'll add The Syntopicon as a really good book that Adler wrote (kinda). 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 ab…

I'd be interested in a copy. How can I reach you?

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

#148

Post by thebooktocome »

yamtaddle wrote: post #41
thebooktocome wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been trendy in the last fifty or so years to strip historical and cultural content from math classes in favor of rote computation (as the former is easiest to test in a “standardized” setting), but I’d argue that dehumanizing mathematics makes it far harder to understand, or indeed even care about. Word problems are the last edifice of natural philosophy in the high school mathematics curriculum and there’s co…

This coupled with a weird fixation on achieving a sufficiently "high" level of mathematics, typically without a strong justification for any non-grad-school-bound students. Reeks of gate-keeping. I've known multiple people who've failed to finish a degree solely because of math classes covering material that they'd almost certainly never have seen again their entire lives, even if they achieved a middling-successful…

I used to TA an intro philosophy course designed for STEM types based on Aristotle’s Physics and etc., and lemme tell you the students ate that shit up.

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.

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

#149

Post by blewboarwastake »

thwayunion wrote: post #51
codybontecou wrote: post #4

Huh, 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…

I found this guy in a random recommended on youtube[1], he is working on a great books curriculum type course that incorporates literature from cultures from the Middle-east, India, Far-east, etc. The complete reading list is in his homepage.

[1] https://www.alexanderarguelles.com/great-books/

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

#150

Post by voldacar »

thwayunion wrote: post #107
voldacar wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't see a huge emphasis on Euclidean constructions, at least not in this particular curriculum. Euclid is just one book among several math books here. However I do think one issue with studying math from a great books perspective is that the level of prerequisite knowledge it takes to even read a lot of texts considered great would take many years of focused study to develop. I don't see Grothendieck in this list for instance. An intelligent child can read Euclid and follow along perfectly, because there isn't really any prerequisite knowledge needed.
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