Great Books Project

A major initiative of this blog is the tracking of a seven-year project to read through the entire 10-volume Gateway to the Great Books series and 60-volume Great Books of the Western World series (now both out of print but available from the linked sellers). You can read the initial post outlining the plan here. The tables of contents for the two series are here and here.

I later amended the project slightly by adopting a schedule of readings that drew from both series simultaneously rather than finishing the Gateway set in its entirety first. Here is the post explaining the change and the reasons behind it.

This post addresses the question many have asked about the absence of the Bible from the Great Books of the Western World series.

The reading schedule for this plan is my own creation. Each Sunday I select six short works or sections of long works totaling around 110 pages for that week and post them (with links to complete texts where available) Monday morning. According to my calculations, this pace of reading will get us through all seventy volumes in seven years. (N.B. The ten-year reading plan published in the 1952 edition of Great Books of the Western World will NOT take you through the entire series. It is more of a “highlights” list. The schedule on this site is much more intensive.)

Each week’s reading list contains at least one selection from each of the four broad categories of literature included in the Great Books series: Imaginative Literature, Man and Society, Natural Sciences, and Philosophy/Theology.

I am building an index of posts I have made as part of this project. You can find it here.

Anyone who is interested in this project is invited to enter the Great Conversation by participating at whatever level is comfortable. Pick a selection from the most recent week’s list, read it, and offer your thoughts or ask a question in the comment section. Or you can mine the archives for other works that interest you and read and comment on those. If you are really ambitious, go back to the first post and start from the beginning!

Since beginning this project in January 2011, we have completed the following works:

Imaginative Literature

Epic Poems:

1. The Odyssey of Homer
2. The Iliad of Homer
3. The Aeneid of Virgil
4. Milton, John: Paradise Lost
5. Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy

Plays:

1. Aristophanes: The Clouds
2. Chekhov, Anton: The Cherry Orchard
3. Euripides: Alcestis
4. Euripides: Medea
5. Ibsen, Henrik: An Enemy of the People
   
6. Molière: The Doctor in Spite of Himself
7. O’Neill, Eugene: The Emperor Jones
8. Pirandello, Luigi: Six Characters in Search of an Author
9. Shakespeare, William: The Taming of the Shrew
10. Shakespeare, William: Julius Caesar
11. Shakespeare, William: The Tempest
12. Shakespeare, William: The Merchant of Venice
13. Shakespeare, William: Macbeth
14. Shakespeare, William: Hamlet
15. Shakespeare, William: As You Like It
16. Shakespeare, William: Richard II
17. Shakespeare, William: The Winter’s Tale
18. Shaw, George Bernard: The Man of Destiny
19. Sheridan, Robert: The School for Scandal
20. Sophocles: Antigone
21. Sophocles: Oedipus the King
22. Synge, J.M.: Riders to the Sea

Short Stories:

1. Anderson, Sherwood: “I’m a Fool”
2. Anonymous: “Aucassin and Nicolette”
3. Balzac, Honoré de: “Passion in the Desert”
4. Chekhov, Anton: “The Darling”
5. Conrad, Joseph: “Youth”
6. Crane, Stephen: “The Open Boat”
7. Dinesen, Isak: “Sorrow-Acre”
8. Dostoevsky, Fyodor: “White Nights”
9. Fitzgerald, F. Scott: “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”
10. Flaubert, Gustave: “The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller”
11. Galsworthy, James: “The Apple Tree”
12. Gogol, Nikolai: “The Overcoat”
13. Hawthorne, Nathaniel: “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
14. Hemingway, Ernest: “The Killers”
15. James, Henry: “The Pupil”
16. Kipling, Rudyard: “Mowgli’s Brothers”
17. Lawrence, D.H.: “The Rocking-Horse Winner”
18. Long, Haniel: “The Power Within Us”
19. Maupassant, Guy de: “Two Friends”
20. Poe, Edgar Allan: “The Tell-Tale Heart”
21. Poe, Edgar Allan: “The Masque of the Red Death”
22. Pushkin, Alexander: “The Queen of Spades”
23. Scott, Walter: “Two Drovers”
24. Tolstoy, Leo: “The Three Hermits”
25. Twain, Mark: “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg”
26. Voltaire: “Micromégas”
27. Wilde, Oscar: “The Happy Prince”

Novels and Novellas:

1. Apuleius, Lucius: The Golden Ass (excerpt)
2. Butler, Samuel: Erewhon (excerpts)
3. Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe
4. Eliot, George: The Lifted Veil
5. Hugo, Victor: Ninety-Three (excerpt)
6. Thomas Mann: Mario and the Magician
7. Melville, Herman: Billy Budd, Sailor
8. Melville, Herman: Moby Dick
9. Orwell, George: Animal Farm
10. Stevenson, Robert L.: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
11. Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver’s Travels
12. Twain, Mark: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Literary and Critical Essays:

1. Arnold, Matthew: “Sweetness and Light”
2. Arnold, Matthew: “The Study of Poetry”
3. Eliot, T.S.: “Dante”
4. Hazlitt, William: “Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen”
5. Hazlitt, William: “On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth”
6. Hazlitt, William: “My First Acquaintance with Poets”
7. Hazlitt, William: “On Swift”
8. Hume, David: “Of the Standard of Taste”
9. Lamb, Charles: “My First Play”
10. Lamb, Charles: “Dream Children, a Reverie”
11. Lamb, Charles: “Sanity of True Genius”
12. De Quincey, Thomas: “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth“
13. De Quincey, Thomas: “Literature of Knowledge and Literature of Power”
14. Schopenhauer, Arthur: “On Some Forms of Literature”
15. Schopenhauer, Arthur: “On Style”
16. Shelley, Percy: “A Defence of Poetry”
17. Whitman, Walt: “Preface” to Leaves of Grass
18. Woolf, Virginia: “How Should One Read a Book?”

Man and Society

Histories and Treatises:

1. Adams, Henry: History of the United States in the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (excerpts)
2. Calhoun, John C.: A Disquisition on Government (excerpt)
3. Herodotus: The Histories
4. Jefferson, Thomas: Notes on the State of Virginia (excerpt)
5. Machiavelli, Niccoló: The Prince
6. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich: Manifesto of the Communist Party
7. Mill, John Stuart: Autobiography (excerpts)
8. Prescott, William: History of the Conquest of Mexico (excerpt)
9. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: The Social Contract
10. Tacitus: Life of Julius Gnaeus Agricola
11. Tacitus: Annals
12. Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
13. de Tocqueville, Alexis: Democracy in America
14. Twain, Mark: Life on the Mississippi (excerpt)
15. Veblen, Thorstein: Theory of the Leisure Class
16. von Clausewitz, Karl: On War (excerpt)
17. Xenophon: Anabasis (excerpt)
18. Xenophon: Marginalia (excerpt)

Constitutional Documents:

1. The English Bill of Rights
2. The Virginia Declaration of Rights
3. The American Declaration of Independence
4. The Articles of Confederation
5. The Constitution of the United States of America
6. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen
7. The Charter of the United Nations
8. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Letters:

1. Burke, Edmund: “Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol”
2. Franklin, Benjamin: “A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America”
3. Franklin, Benjamin: “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania”
4. Jefferson, Thomas: “Biographical Sketches of Washington and Franklin”
5. Lincoln, Abraham: “To Horace Greeley”
6. Pliny the Younger: “The Eruption of Vesuvius”
7. Voltaire: Philosophical Letters on the English (excerpts)
8. Washington, George: “Circular Letter to the Governors upon the Disbanding of the Army”
9. Washington, George: “Farewell Address”

Speeches:

1. Bury, J.B.: “Herodotus”
2. Carlyle, Thomas: “The Hero as King”
3. Faraday, Michael: “Observations on Mental Education”
4. Guizot, Francois: “Civilization”
5. Jefferson, Thomas: “First Inaugural Address”
6. Lincoln, Abraham: “The Gettysburg Address”
7. Lincoln, Abraham: “Second Inaugural Address”
8. Lincoln, Abraham: “Last Public Address”
9. Lincoln, Abraham: “Address at Cooper Institute”
10. Lincoln, Abraham: “First Inaugural Address”

Essays:

1. St. Jean de Crèvecoeur: “The Making of Americans” from Letters From an American Farmer
2. Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “Thoreau”
3. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay: The Federalist
4. Hawthorne, Nathaniel: “Sketch of Abraham Lincoln” from “Chiefly About War Matters”
5. Hume, David: “Of the Study of History”
6. Hume, David: “Of Refinement in the Arts”
7. Hume, David: “Of the Balance of Trade”
8. Hume, David: “Of Money”
9. James, William: “The Energies of Men”
10. James, William: “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings”
11. La Bruyère, Jean de: Characters (excerpts)
12. Lincoln, Abraham: “Meditation on the Divine Will”
13. Lucian: “The Way to Write History”
14. Macaulay, Thomas Babington: “Machiavelli”
15. Malthus, Thomas: Essay on the Principle of Population (excerpts)
16. Milton, John: Areopagitica
17. Paine, Thomas: “A Call to Patriots” from The Crisis
18. Plutarch: Of Bashfulness
19. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: “A Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe”
20. Ruskin, John: “An Idealist’s Arraignment of the Age”
21. Schopenhauer, Arthur:”On Education”
22. Swift, Jonathan: “Resolutions When I Come to Be Old”
23. Swift, Jonathan: “A Meditation Upon a Broomstick”
24. Swift, Jonathan: “A Modest Proposal”
25. Swift, Jonathan: “An Essay on Modern Education”
26. Thoreau, Henry David: “A Plea for Captain John Brown”
27. Thoreau, Henry David: “Civil Disobedience”
28. Whitman, Walt: “The Death of Abraham Lincoln”
29. Woolf, Virginia: “The Art of Biography”

Natural Sciences

Physical Sciences:

1. Archimedes: “The Sand-Reckoner”
2. Archimedes: “On Floating Bodies”
3. Bacon, Francis: “The Sphinx”
4. Bernard, Claude: “Experimental Considerations Common to Living Things and Inorganic Bodies”
5. Boeke, Kees: Cosmic View
6. Campanella, Tomasso: A Defense of Galileo (excerpt)
7. Carson, Rachel: The Sea Around Us (excerpt)
8. Curie, Eve: Madame Curie (excerpt)
9. Darwin, Charles: Autobiography
10. Darwin, Charles: On the Origin of Species
11. Eddington, Sir Arthur: The Nature of the Physical World (excerpt)
12. Einstein, Albert and Infeld, Leopold: The Evolution of Physics (excerpts)
13. Eiseley, Loren: The Immense Journey (excerpt)
14. Fabre, Jean-Henri: The Sacred Beetle and Others (excerpts)
15. Faraday, Michael: “The Chemical History of a Candle”
16. Galen: On the Natural  Faculties
17. Galilei, Galileo: “The Starry Messenger”
18. Galilei, Galileo: Dialogues Concerning the Two New Sciences
19. Galton, Sir Francis: Hereditary Genius (excerpt)
20. Gilbert, William: On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
21. Haldane, J.B.S.: “On Being the Right Size”
22. Harvey, William: Anatomical Disquisition on the Circulation of the Heart and Blood in Animals
23. Hippocrates: The Hippocratic Oath
24. Hippocrates: “On Ancient Medicine”
25. Hippocrates: “On Airs, Waters, and Places”
26. Hippocrates: “The Book of Prognostics”
27. Hippocrates: “On the Sacred Disease”
28. Huxley, Thomas: “On a Piece of Chalk”
29. Huxlet, Thomas: “The Relation of Man to the Lower Animals”
30. Jeans, Sir James: The  Universe Around Us (excerpt)
31. Lyell, Sir Charles: Principles of Geology (excerpt)
32. Mendeleev, Dmitri: The
33. Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich: Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes (excerpt)
34. Schrödinger, Erwin: What Is Life?
35. Tyndall, John: Faraday as a Discoverer (excerpts)
36. Wöhler, Friedrich: “On the Artificial Production of Urea”

Mathematics:

1. Campbell, Norman Robert: What Is Science? (excerpts)
2. Clifford, W.K.: “Postulates of the Science of Space”
3. Dantzig, Tobias: Number–The Language of Science (excerpts)
4. Descartes, René: The Geometry
5. Euclid: Elements
6. Euler, Leonhard: “The Seven Bridges of Königsberg”
7. Forsyth, Andrew Russell: “Mathematics in Life and Thought”
8. Hogben, Lancelot: Mathematics for the Million (excerpt)
9. Kasner and Newman: Mathematics and the Imagination (excerpts)
10. de Laplace, Pierre Simon: A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (excerpt)
11. Peirce, Charles Sanders: “The Red and the Black”
12. Poincaré, Henri: Science and Method (excerpts)
13. Ptolemy: The Almagest
14. Russell, Bertrand: Mysticism and Logic (excerpts)
15. Russell, Bertrand: Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (excerpt)
16. Whitehead, Alfred N.: An Introduction to Mathematics (excerpt)

Philosophy and Theology:

Treatises and Longer Works:

1. Adams, Henry: Mont St. Michel and Chartres (excerpt)
2. Aristotle: Politics
3. Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics
4. Aristotle: Poetics
5. Aristotle: Posterior Analytics
6. Aristotle: Physics
7. Aristotle: Metaphysics
8. Aristotle: On Sense and the Sensible
9. Aristotle: Categories
10. St. Augustine of Hippo: Confessions
11. St. Augustine of Hippo: The City of God
12. Bacon, Francis: The New Atlantis
13. Bacon, Francis: The Advancement of Learning
14. Bacon, Francis: Novum Organum
15. Berkeley, George: The Principles of Human Knowledge
16. Descartes, René: Discourse on Method
17. Descartes, René: Rules for the Direction of the Mind
18. Dewey, John: How We Think (excerpts)
19. Hegel, G.W.F.: The Philosophy of Right
20. Hume, David: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
21. Kant, Immanuel: The Critique of Pure Reason
22. Locke, John: Second Treatise on Civil Government
23. Lucretius: The Way Things Are (AKA On the Nature of Things)
24. Plato: Republic
25. Voltaire: Philosophical Dictionary (excerpt)

Dialogues and Other Shorter Works:

1. Cicero: On Friendship
2. Cicero: On Old Age
3. Epictetus: Enchiridion
4. Plato: Meno
5. Plato: The Apology
6. Plato: Crito
7. Plato: Phaedo
8. Plato: Symposium
9. Plato: Protagoras
10. Plato: Charmides
11. Plato: Gorgias
12. Plato: Euthydemus
13. Plato: Cratylus
14. Plato: Phaedrus
15. Plutarch: On Contentment
16. Plutarch: On Bashfulness

Essays, Lectures, and Letters:

1. Bacon, Francis: Essays (excerpts)
2. Bergson, Henri: An Introduction to Metaphysics
3. Browne, Sir Thomas: Urn-Burial (excerpt)
4. Clifford, William: “The Ethics of Belief”
5. Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “Self-Reliance”
6. Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “Montaigne”
7. Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “Nature”
8. Epicurus: “Letter to Menoeceus”
9. Epicurus: “Letter to Herodotus”
10. Erskine, John: “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent”
11. Hazlitt, William: “On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth”
12. James, William: “The Will to Believe”
13. James, William: “The Sentiment of Rationality”
14. Locke, John: “A Letter Concerning Toleration”
15. Mill, John Stuart: “On Nature”
16. Pater, Walter: “The Art of Life”
17. Santayana, George: “Lucretius” (from Three Philosophical Poets)
18. Santayana, George: “Goethe’s Faust” (from Three Philosophical Poets)

Works in Progress

1. Michel de Montaigne: Essays
2. Plutarch: Lives of the Ancient Greeks and Romans
3. Epictetus: Discourses
4. St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica
5. Freud, Sigmund: The Interpretation of Dreams