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

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.

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.

Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, most college grads (let alone non-grads) from traditional programs that weren't poli-sci or philosophy would receive a better "citizen of the world" education from reading and understanding the first couple books of The Republic than they evidently picked up in 17 or more damn years of formal schooling.

They could literally exceed all that education in a lazy Sunday afternoon, because despite all those years they somehow failed to appreciate what the questions even are and that those questions aren't as easy to dismiss as many pop-understandings and pop-philosophies suggest, so they end up with these embarrassingly-bad ideas about it (and are often weirdly confident that they know it all!).

They're in exactly the same position as the targets of Socrates' "what is justice, actually?" question at the very damn beginning of the book, thinking they have a simple answer for the question and that their answer's more-or-less adequate. That's how far all that education got them. No-where, in other words.

But, as you note, it'd probably be a terrible way to actually learn how to engineer software. More intellectually satisfying, though :)

> It's amusing that they have students read Pikkety's "Capital" before Marx's "Capital".

I get why it's amusing, but it also makes sense. Marx's "Capital" is kind of a beast. Pikkety's is written more-or-less toward a modern general audience. If I were sequencing these books in a student's intellectual development, Pikkety definitely comes before Marx.

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 whom it happened was the shock, not the dehumanization and mass murder and wanton destruction and boundless greed itself. Look elsewhere and you'll find the same—the powerless, and the abusers. Even the friggin' Buddhists were loan-sharks and remorseless murderers, from time to time, and educated plenty of brutal heads of state.

That's not enough to indict a vast millennia-long philosophical, cultural, and intellectual tradition—it's the fucking human condition. People've stacked high the skulls of The Other since before civilization. One might hope civilization counters that—and there's strong evidence it does—but we've been at this civilization thing for like 10,000+ years and haven't figure out how to get rid of it yet. That's not Western Civ's fault, it's just... us. Humans.