In idle moments I sometimes think that if I had it all to do over again, I would like to have attended St. John's College (Annapolis or Santa Fe campus, no matter). If you want to feel like a boorish dunce, go ahead and scan the St. John's Reading List below. That's their core curriculum, completed by every St. John's graduate. How many of these titles have you read? My guess is that the average college graduate is not even acquainted with 10% of these books. (If your college doesn't require that you read a significant number of these books, you might wish to question the quality of the education they are delivering.)
I haven't read them all, either (not by a long shot -- Lavoisier's Elements of Chemistry? Seriously?). I don't intend to turn this blog into some kind of stunt (like that woman who spent every day for a year cooking a dish from the Julia Child cookbook), but I think I will give the St. John's Reading List a go. Starting at the end of August 2013, I will start tackling the books in the order they are assigned to St. John's students. (I will have it a bit easier since I have read more than a few of the books already -- I'll re-read those, however.)
The next four years are going to go by anyway, why not spend some portion of them devouring the Great Books? I'll let you know if (and how) it makes me a better clinical psychologist. I'll let you know if I quit, too.
The Reading List
"The reading list that serves as the core of the St. John's College curriculum had its beginnings at Columbia College, at the University of Chicago, and at the University of Virginia. Since 1937, the list of books has been under continued review at St. John's College. The distribution of the books over the four years is significant. Something over 2,000 years of intellectual history form the background of the first two years; about 300 years of history form the background for almost twice as many authors in the last two years.The first year is devoted to Greek authors and their pioneering understanding of the liberal arts; the second year contains books from the Roman, medieval, and Renaissance periods; the third year has books of the 17th and 18th centuries, most of which were written in modern languages; the fourth year brings the reading into the 19th and 20th centuries.
The chronological order in which the books are read is primarily a matter of convenience and intelligibility; it does not imply a historical approach to the subject matter. The St. John's curriculum seeks to convey to students an understanding of the fundamental problems that human beings have to face today and at all times. It invites them to reflect both on their continuities and their discontinuities."
FRESHMAN YEAR
- HOMER: Iliad, Odyssey
- AESCHYLUS: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides, Prometheus Bound
- SOPHOCLES: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Philoctetes, Ajax
- THUCYDIDES: Peloponnesian War
- EURIPIDES: Hippolytus, Bacchae
- HERODOTUS: Histories
- ARISTOPHANES: Clouds
- PLATO: Meno, Gorgias, Republic, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium, Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Timaeus, Phaedrus
- ARISTOTLE: Poetics, Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, On Generation and Corruption, Politics, Parts of Animals, Generation of Animals
- EUCLID: Elements
- LUCRETIUS: On the Nature of Things
- PLUTARCH: Lycurgus, Solon
- NICOMACHUS: Arithmetic
- LAVOISIER: Elements of Chemistry
- HARVEY: Motion of the Heart and Blood
- Essays by: Archimedes, Fahrenheit, Avogadro, Dalton, Cannizzaro, Virchow, Mariotte, Driesch, Gay-Lussac, Spemann, Stears, J.J. Thompson, Mendeleyev, Berthollet, J.L. Proust
SOPHOMORE YEAR
- HEBREW BIBLE
- THE BIBLE: New Testament
- ARISTOTLE: De Anima, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Categories
- APOLLONIUS: Conics
- VIRGIL: Aeneid
- PLUTARCH: "Caesar," "Cato the Younger," "Antony," "Brutus"
- EPICTETUS: Discourses, Manual
- TACITUS: Annals
- PTOLEMY: Almagest
- PLOTINUS: The Enneads
- AUGUSTINE: Confessions
- MAIMONIDES: Guide for the Perplexed
- ST. ANSELM: Proslogium
- AQUINAS: Summa Theologica
- DANTE: Divine Comedy
- CHAUCER: Canterbury Tales
- MACHIAVELLI: The Prince, Discourses
- KEPLER: Epitome IV
- RABELAIS: Gargantua and Pantagruel
- PALESTRINA: Missa Papae Marcelli
- MONTAIGNE: Essays
- VIETE: Introduction to the Analytical Art
- BACON: Novum Organum
- SHAKESPEARE: Richard II, Henry IV, The Tempest, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and Sonnets
- POEMS BY: Marvell, Donne, and other 16th- and 17th-century poets
- DESCARTES: Geometry, Discourse on Method
- PASCAL: Generation of Conic Sections
- BACH: St. Matthew Passion, Inventions
- HAYDN: Quartets
- MOZART: Operas
- BEETHOVEN: Third Symphony
- SCHUBERT: Songs
- MONTEVERDI: L'Orfeo
- STRAVINSKY: Symphony of Psalms
JUNIOR YEAR
- CERVANTES: Don Quixote
- GALILEO: Two New Sciences
- HOBBES: Leviathan
- DESCARTES: Meditations, Rules for the Direction of the Mind
- MILTON: Paradise Lost
- LA ROCHEFOUCAULD: Maximes
- LA FONTAINE: Fables
- PASCAL: Pensees
- HUYGENS: Treatise on Light, On the Movement of Bodies by Impact
- ELIOT: Middlemarch
- SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise
- LOCKE: Second Treatise of Government
- RACINE: Phaedre
- NEWTON: Principia Mathematica
- KEPLER: Epitome IV
- LEIBNIZ: Monadology, Discourse on Metaphysics, Essay On Dynamics, Philosophical Essays, Principles of Nature and Grace
- SWIFT: Gulliver's Travels
- HUME: Treatise of Human Nature
- ROUSSEAU: Social Contract, The Origin of Inequality
- MOLIERE: Le Misanthrope
- ADAM SMITH: Wealth of Nations
- KANT: Critique of Pure Reason, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
- MOZART: Don Giovanni
- JANE AUSTEN: Pride and Prejudice
- DEDEKIND: "Essay on the Theory of Numbers"
- "Articles of Confederation," "Declaration of Independence," "Constitution of the United States of America"
- HAMILTON, JAY AND MADISON: The Federalist
- TWAIN: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- WORDSWORTH: The Two Part Prelude of 1799
- Essays by: Young, Taylor, Euler, D. Bernoulli, Orsted, Ampere, Faraday, Maxwell
SENIOR YEAR
- Supreme Court opinions
- GOETHE: Faust
- DARWIN: Origin of Species
- HEGEL: Phenomenology of Mind, "Logic" (from the Encyclopedia)
- LOBACHEVSKY: Theory of Parallels
- TOCQUEVILLE: Democracy in America
- LINCOLN: Selected Speeches
- FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Selected Speeches
- KIERKEGAARD: Philosophical Fragments, Fear and Trembling
- WAGNER: Tristan and Isolde
- MARX: Capital, Political and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology
- DOSTOEVSKI: Brothers Karamazov
- TOLSTOY: War and Peace
- MELVILLE: Benito Cereno
- O'CONNOR: Selected Stories
- WILLIAM JAMES; Psychology, Briefer Course
- NIETZSCHE: Beyond Good and Evil
- FREUD: Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
- BOOKER T. WASHINGTON: Selected Writings
- DUBOIS: The Souls of Black Folk
- HUSSERL: Crisis of the European Sciences
- HEIDEGGER: Basic Writings
- EINSTEIN: Selected papers
- CONRAD: Heart of Darkness
- FAULKNER: Go Down Moses
- FLAUBERT: Un Coeur Simple
- WOOLF: Mrs. Dalloway
- Poems by: Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Valery, Rimbaud
- Essays by: Faraday, J.J. Thomson, Millikan, Minkowski, Rutherford, Davisson, Schrodinger, Bohr, Maxwell, de Broglie, Heisenberg, Mendel, Boveri, Sutton, Morgan, Beadle & Tatum, Sussman, Watson & Crick, Jacob & Monod, Hardy
To give a sense of the pace of reading, and to see how it can all be done, be sure to check out the seminar reading assignments (see example below). Wouldn't that have been something -- to come home for Christmas break and actually be able to reply to the question, "What did you learn during your first semester at college?" "Well, I read and discussed Homer, Plato, Aeschylus, Herotodus, Thucydides, Aristophanes, and a little Plutarch."
| Date | Freshman Reading (Detailed) |
| Aug. 23, 2012 | Homer: Iliad I-VI |
| Aug. 27, 2012 | Homer: Iliad VII-XII |
| Aug. 30, 2012 | Homer: Iliad XIII-XVIII |
| Sep. 03, 2012 | Homer: Iliad XIX-XXIV |
| Sep. 06, 2012 | Homer: Odyssey I-VIII |
| Sep. 10, 2012 | Homer: Odyssey IX-XVI |
| Sep. 13, 2012 | Homer: Odyssey XVII-XXIV |
| Sep. 17, 2012 | Plato: Meno |
| Sep. 20, 2012 | Aeschylus: Agamemnon |
| Sep. 24, 2012 | Aeschylus: Libation Bearers; Eumenides |
| Sep. 27, 2012 | Plato: Gorgias 447A-481B |
| Oct. 01, 2012 | Plato: Gorgias 481B-527E |
| Oct. 04, 2012 | Plutarch: Lives Lycurgus; Solon |
| Oct. 08, 2012 | Herodotus: History I; II, 50-53, 112-120; III, 37, 38, 66-87 |
| Oct. 11, 2012 | Herodotus: History V, 76-78, 91-93, 105; VI, 48, 56-72, 94-120; VII (entire) |
| Oct. 15, 2012 | Herodotus: History VIII; IX |
| Oct. 18, 2012 | Plato: Republic I-II 367E |
| Oct. 22, 2012 | Plato: Republic II 367E-IV 427C |
| Oct. 25, 2012 | Plato: Republic IV 427D-VI 502C |
| Oct. 29, 2012 | Plato: Republic VI 502D-VII |
| Nov. 01, 2012 | Plato: Republic VIII-IX |
| Nov. 05, 2012 | Plato: Republic X |
| Nov. 8, 2012 | Aristophanes: Clouds |
| Nov. 12, 2012 | Plato: Apology and Crito |
| Nov. 15, 2012 | Plato: Phaedo 57A-84B |
| Nov. 19, 2012 | Plato: Phaedo 84B-118B |
| Nov. 26, 2012 | Thucydides: Peloponnesian War I; II, 1-46 |
| Nov. 29, 2012 | Thucydides: Peloponnesian War II, 47-end; III; IV, 1-41 |
| Dec. 03, 2012 | Thucydides: Peloponnesian War IV, 42-end; V; VI, 1-32 |
| Dec. 06, 2012 | Thucydides: Peloponnesian War VI, 33-end; VII |
| Dec. 10, 2012 | Plato: Symposium beginning-198A |
| Dec. 13, (Thurs.) 2012 | Plato: Symposium 198-end |
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