Great Books

Great Books

Great Books refers to a curriculum and a book list. Mortimer Adler lists three criteria for including a book on the list:

* the book has contemporary significance; that is, it has relevance to the problems and issues of our times;
* the book is inexhaustible; it can be read again and again with benefit;
* the book is relevant to a large number of the great ideas and great issues that have occupied the minds of thinking individuals for the last 25 centuries.--"(Adler, "Second Look", pg 142)"

Origin

It came about as the result of a discussion among American academics and educators, starting in the 1920s and 1930s and begun by Prof. John Erskine of Columbia University, [ [http://www.literarycritic.com/adler2.htm Mortimer Adler, "The Great Books, the Great Ideas, and a Lifetime of Learning," HARVARD'S LOWELL LECTURE - APRIL 11, 1990] ] about how to improve the higher education system by returning it to the western liberal arts tradition of broad cross-disciplinary learning. These academics and educators included Robert Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, and Alexander Meiklejohn. The view among them was that the emphasis on narrow specialization in American colleges had harmed the quality of higher education by failing to expose students to the important products of Western civilization and thought.

They were at odds both with much of the existing educational establishment and with contemporary educational theory. Educational theorists like Sidney Hook and John Dewey ("see pragmatism") disagreed with the premise that there was crossover in education (e.g, that a study of philosophy, formal logic, or rhetoric could be of use in medicine or economics).

Great Books started out as a list of 100 essential primary source texts considered to constitute the Western Canon. This list was always intended to be tentative, although many critics considered it presumptuous and laughable to nominate 100 "Great" Books to the exclusion of all others.

Program

The Great Books Program is a curriculum that makes use of this list of texts. The undergraduate program as implemented at St. John's College involves a four-year set course of studies consisting of four classes:

*Science— Natural science from Aristotle to Einstein
*Mathematics— from Euclid to Einstein
*Language— Translation of Greek and French texts and study of logic and poetry
*Seminar— Twice-weekly two-hour discussion of a work of philosophy or literature

As much as possible, students rely on primary sources. They are encouraged to conduct classes themselves, with guidance from a tutor.

In 1919, Professor Erskine taught the first course based on the "great books" program, titled "General Honors," at Columbia University. Erskine left for the University of Chicago in the 1920's, and helped mold its core curriculum. It initially failed, however, shortly after its introduction due to fallings-out between the instructors over the best ways to conduct classes and due to concerns about the rigor of the courses. However, to this day, both Chicago and Columbia maintain required core curricula heavily focused on the "great books" of the Western Canon. Several schools maintain a Great Books Program as an option for students, but some of the most prominent schools are the University of Notre Dame, Pepperdine University, University of San Francisco, Mercer University, University of Dallas, Furman University, St. John's College sister schools, Shimer College, Thomas Aquinas College, Gutenberg College, the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, the Integral Liberal Arts program at Saint Mary's College of California (Moraga), the Hutchins School at Sonoma State University, and the Louisiana Scholars' College at Northwestern State University (Natchitoches). [http://www.nas.org/reports/gt_bks/gb_programs.htm]

eries

The "Great Books of the Western World" is a hardcover 60-volume collection (originally 54 volumes) of the books on the Great Books list. Many of the books in the collection were translated into English for the first time. A prominent feature of the collection is a two-volume "Syntopicon" that includes essays written by Mortimer Adler on 102 "great ideas." Following each essay is an extensive outline of the idea with page references to relevant passages throughout the collection. Familiar to many Americans, the collection is available from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., which owns the copyright.

Shortly after Adler retired from the Great Books Foundation in 1989, a second edition (1990) of the "Great Books of the Western World" was published; it included for the first time works by black, Hispanic, and women authors. [cite web|url=http://calbears.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4155/is_20010701/ai_n13916438|author=Sabrina Walters|title=Great Books won Adler fame, scorn|publisher="Chicago Sun-Times"|date=2001-07-01|accessdate=2007-07-11] During his tenure as president of the Foundation, Adler had resisted such inclusions. [cite web|url=http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4155/is_20010703/ai_n13917760|author=Peter Temes|title=Death of a Great Reader and Philosopher|publisher="Chicago Sun-Times"|date=2001-07-03|accessdate=2007-07-11]

ample list

Any recommended set of great books is expected to change with the times, as reflected in the following statement by Robert Hutchins: ["Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education", New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954.]

"In the course of history... new books have been written that have won their place in the list. Books once thought entitled to belong to it have been superseded; and this process of change will continue as long as men can think and write. It is the task of every generation to reassess the tradition in which it lives, to discard what it cannot use, and to bring into context with the distant and intermediate past the most recent contributions to the Great Conversation."

The following is an example list from "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. (1940, 1972)

# Homer: "The Iliad", "The Odyssey"
# The Old Testament
# Aeschylus: Tragedies
# Sophocles: Tragedies
# Herodotus: "Histories"
# Euripides: Tragedies
# Thucydides: "History of the Peloponnesian War"
# Hippocrates: Medical Writings
# Aristophanes: Comedies
# Plato: Dialogues
# Aristotle: Works
# Epicurus: "Letter to Herodotus", "Letter to Menoecus"
# Euclid: "The Elements"
# Archimedes: Works
# Apollonius: "The Conic Sections"
# Cicero: Works
# Lucretius: "On the Nature of Things"
# Virgil: Works
# Horace: Works
# Livy: "The History of Rome"
# Ovid: Works
# Plutarch: "Parallel Lives"; "Moralia"
# Tacitus: "Histories"; "Annals"; "Agricola"; "Germania"
# Nicomachus of Gerasa: "Introduction to Arithmetic"
# Epictetus: Discourses; "Enchiridion"
# Ptolemy: "Almagest"
# Lucian: Works
# Marcus Aurelius: "Meditations"
# Galen: "On the Natural Faculties"
# The New Testament
# Plotinus: "The Enneads"
# St. Augustine: "On the Teacher"; "Confessions"; "City of God"; "On Christian Doctrine"
# The Song of Roland
# The Nibelungenlied
# The Saga of Burnt Njál
# St. Thomas Aquinas: "Summa Theologica"
# Dante Alighieri: "The New Life" ("La Vita Nuova"); "On Monarchy"; "The Divine Comedy"
# Geoffrey Chaucer: "Troilus and Criseyde"; "The Canterbury Tales"
# Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks
# Niccolò Machiavelli: "The Prince"; "Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy"
# Desiderius Erasmus: "The Praise of Folly"
# Nicolaus Copernicus: "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres"
# Thomas More: "Utopia"
# Martin Luther: "Table Talk"; Three Treatises
# Francois Rabelais: "Gargantua and Pantagruel"
# John Calvin: "Institutes of the Christian Religion"
# Michel de Montaigne: "Essays"
# William Gilbert: "On the Lodestone and Magnetic Bodies"
# Miguel de Cervantes: "Don Quixote"
# Edmund Spenser: "Prothalamion"; "The Faerie Queene"
# Francis Bacon: "Essays"; "The Advancement of Learning"; "Novum Organum"; "The New Atlantis"
# William Shakespeare: Poetry and Plays
# Galileo Galilei: "Starry Messenger"; "Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences"
# Johannes Kepler: "The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy"; "Concerning the Harmonies of the World"
# William Harvey: "On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals"; "On the Circulation of the Blood"; "On the Generation of Animals"
# Thomas Hobbes: "Leviathan"
# René Descartes: "Rules for the Direction of the Mind"; "Discourse on Method"; "Geometry"; "Meditations on First Philosophy"
# John Milton: Works
# Molière: Comedies
# Blaise Pascal: "The Provincial Letters"; "Pensées"; Scientific Treatises
# Christiaan Huygens: "Treatise on Light"
# Benedict de Spinoza: "Ethics"
# John Locke: Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Thoughts Concerning Education
# Jean Baptiste Racine: Tragedies
# Isaac Newton: "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"; "Opticks"
# Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz: "Discourse on Metaphysics"; "New Essays Concerning Human Understanding"; "Monadology"
# Daniel Defoe: "Robinson Crusoe"
# Jonathan Swift: "A Tale of a Tub"; "Journal to Stella"; "Gulliver's Travels"; "A Modest Proposal"
# William Congreve: "The Way of the World"
# George Berkeley: "Principles of Human Knowledge"
# Alexander Pope: "Essay on Criticism"; "The Rape of the Lock"; "Essay on Man"
# Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu: "Persian Letters", "Spirit of the Laws"
# Voltaire: "Letters on the English Nation", "Candide", "Philosophical Dictionary"
# Henry Fielding: "Joseph Andrews", "Tom Jones"
# Samuel Johnson: "The Vanity of Human Wishes", "Dictionary", "Rasselas", "Lives of the Poets"
# David Hume: "A Treatise of Human Nature", "Essays Moral and Political", "An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding"
# Jean-Jacques Rousseau: "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality", "On Political Economy", "Emile", "The Social Contract"
# Laurence Sterne: "Tristram Shandy", "A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy"
# Adam Smith: "The Theory of Moral Sentiments", "The Wealth of Nations"
# Immanuel Kant: "Critique of Pure Reason", "Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals", "Critique of Practical Reason"; The Science of Right; "Critique of Judgment", Perpetual Peace
# Edward Gibbon: "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"; Autobiography
# James Boswell: Journal; "The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D."
# Antoine Laurent Lavoisier: "Elements of Chemistry"
# Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison: "The Federalist Papers"
# Jeremy Bentham: "Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation"; "Theory of Fictions"
# Edmund Burke: "Reflections on the Revolution in France"
# Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "Faust"; Poetry and Truth
# Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier: "Analytical Theory of Heat"
# Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: "The Phenomenology of Spirit"; "The Philosophy of Right"; "Lectures on the Philosophy of History"
# William Wordsworth: Poems
# Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems; "Biographia Literaria"
# Jane Austen: "Pride and Prejudice"; "Emma"
# Carl von Clausewitz: "On War"
# Stendhal: "The Red and the Black"; "The Charterhouse of Parma"; "Stendhal"
# Lord Byron: "Don Juan"
# Arthur Schopenhauer: "Studies in Pessimism"
# Michael Faraday: "Chemical History of a Candle"; "Experimental Researches in Electricity"
# Charles Lyell: "Principles of Geology"
# Auguste Comte: "The Positive Philosophy"
# Honoré de Balzac: "Le Père Goriot"; "Eugenie Grandet"
# Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Representative Men", "Essays", Journal
# Nathaniel Hawthorne: "The Scarlet Letter"
# Alexis de Tocqueville: "Democracy in America"
# John Stuart Mill: A System of Logic; "On Liberty"; "Representative Government"; "Utilitarianism"; "The Subjection of Women"; "Autobiography"
# Charles Darwin: "The Origin of Species"; "The Descent of Man"; Autobiography
# Charles Dickens: "The Pickwick Papers"; "David Copperfield"; "Hard Times"
# Claude Bernard: "Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine"
# Henry David Thoreau: "Civil Disobedience"; "Walden"
# Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: "Capital"; "The Communist Manifesto"
# George Eliot: "Adam Bede"; "Middlemarch"
# Herman Melville: "Moby-Dick"; "Billy Budd"
# Fyodor Dostoevsky: "Crime and Punishment"; "The Idiot"; "The Brothers Karamazov"
# Gustave Flaubert: "Madame Bovary"; "Three Stories"
# Henrik Ibsen: Plays
# Leo Tolstoy: "War and Peace"; "Anna Karenina"; "What is Art?"; Twenty-Three Tales
# Mark Twain: "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"; "The Mysterious Stranger"
# William James: "The Principles of Psychology"; "The Varieties of Religious Experience"; "Pragmatism"; "Essays in Radical Empiricism"
# Henry James: "The American (novel)"; "The Ambassadors"
# Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"; "Beyond Good and Evil"; "The Genealogy of Morals"; "The Will to Power"
# Jules Henri Poincaré: "Science and Hypothesis"; "Science and Method"
# Sigmund Freud: "The Interpretation of Dreams"; "Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis"; "Civilization and Its Discontents"; "New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis"
# George Bernard Shaw: Plays and Prefaces
# Max Planck: "Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory"; "Where Is Science Going?"; "Scientific Autobiography"
# Henri Bergson: "Time and Free Will"; "Matter and Memory"; "Creative Evolution"; "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion"
# John Dewey: "How We Think"; "Democracy and Education"; "Experience and Nature"; "Logic"; "The Theory of Inquiry"
# Alfred North Whitehead: "An Introduction to Mathematics"; "Science and the Modern World"; "The Aims of Education and Other Essays"; "Adventures of Ideas"
# George Santayana: "The Life of Reason"; "Skepticism and Animal Faith"; "Persons and Places"
# Lenin: "The State and Revolution"
# Marcel Proust: "Remembrance of Things Past" (the revised translation is "In Search of Lost Time"; the original French title is "À la recherche du temps perdu")
# Bertrand Russell: "The Problems of Philosophy"; "The Analysis of Mind"; "An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth"; "Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits"
# Thomas Mann: "The Magic Mountain"; "Joseph and His Brothers"
# Albert Einstein: "The Meaning of Relativity"; "On the Method of Theoretical Physics"; "The Evolution of Physics"
# James Joyce: "The Dead" in "Dubliners"; "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"; "Ulysses"
# Jacques Maritain: "Art and Scholasticism"; "The Degrees of Knowledge"; "The Rights of Man and Natural Law"; "True Humanism"
# Franz Kafka: "The Trial"; "The Castle"
# Arnold J. Toynbee: "A Study of History"; "Civilization on Trial"
# Jean-Paul Sartre: "Nausea"; "No Exit"; "Being and Nothingness"
# Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: "The First Circle"; "Cancer Ward"

Television

In 1993 and 1994, the Learning Channel did a series of one hour shows discussing many of the great books of history and their impact on the world. It was narrated by Donald Sutherland.

References

ee also

*Educational perennialism
*Great Books of the Western World
*Gutenberg College
*Harrison Middleton University
*Shimer College
*St. John's College, U.S.
*Thomas Aquinas College
*University of King's College
*Dead White Males
*San Elijo College

External links

* [http://www.nas.org/reports/gt_bks/gb_programs.htm List of colleges and universities with "Great Books" programs]
* [http://www.Shimer.edu/ Shimer College] A Great Books College in Chicago
* [http://www.nyu.edu/gallatin/current/ba/colloquium-suggestions.html New York University] An extensive reading list.
* [http://www.pbs.org/shattering/culture.html Culture Wars and the Great Conversation] (@pbs.org) by Ron Dorfman
* [http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/ St. John's College]
* [http://www.gutenberg.edu/ Gutenberg College]
* [http://galileo.stmarys-ca.edu/integral Saint Mary's College of California]
* [http://w3.stu.ca/stu/academic/departments/great_ideas/great_ideas.aspx St Thomas University's Great Ideas Programme]
* [http://www.thomasaquinas.edu/ Thomas Aquinas College] Santa Paula
* [http://www.biola.edu/academics/torrey/ Torrey Honors Institute, Biola University] California
* [http://www.ukings.ca/kings_2900.html University of King's College (Halifax) - Foundation Year Programme]
* [http://www.thomasmorecollege.edu/ Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts]
* [http://www.sonoma.edu/hutchins/ The Hutchins School at Sonoma State University] An expanded canon Great Books school within a school.
* [http://www.optimates.us/Greatbooks.htm Great-Books Reading List: Western Canon] A self-described elitist and traditional great-books reading list.
* [http://www.sanelijocollege.org/ San Elijo College] San Diego, California


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