Not an alum, but in an effort to improve my written and spoken english, I picked up the list and read the about 80% of the content. I was kind to myself and skipped any book that I absolutely found a slog (there were only a few, Aristotle's metaphysics and some early of the dark age Christian philosophy). The book list is really good at telling you to skip the really irrelevant bits of ancient books.
I found that reading so much ancient literature:
1. It ruined a lot of popular Hollywood movies for me as a lot of the modern stories are retellings of very old ones.
2. I finally got a whole lot of cultural references in modern literature that I missed previously. Many modern authors will name a character in a text as a callback to some old story (rocinante in 'the expanse' comes to mind).
3. I thought reading so much content would improve my reading speed, but since most of what i read was in weird greek prose, conversational aristotlean, iambic pentameter, or ye ole english it really didn't.
RE 3: as an SJC alum, I found my reading speed slowed drastically both during and after four years spent reading and discussing these books. I found myself thinking while reading more often, making more connections within and between works.
That said, reading alone misses the meat of “The Program” (always capitalized!) - it’s the searching, pointed, urgent discussion of a work with others who share a common language (from all having read and discussed the earlier works in the Program) that provoked deep thought and reflection, held me to account for intellectual rigor, and built up my faculty for critical thinking.
> That said, reading alone misses the meat of “The Program” (always capitalized!) - it’s the searching, pointed, urgent discussion of a work with others who share a common language (from all having read and discussed the earlier works in the Program) that provoked deep thought and reflection, held me to account for intellectual rigor, and built up my faculty for critical thinking.
Is there anywhere online that achieves anything close to this for this curriculum for people who can’t attend full time in person? An HN for SJC curriculum?
>Is there anywhere online that achieves anything close to this for this curriculum for people who can’t attend full time in person? An HN for SJC curriculum?
St. John's recently expanded their part-time Graduate program to be online.
Is it usually a value-add or how often does the push for intellectual rigor slide to something else? Had a notoriously argumentative coworker from nearby SJ in SF. He’d always swear he was just asking questions or wanted to know why “they chose this way over another” but not so secretly just wanted the world to burn.
Lol. At SJC? Almost always a value-add. That said, what people are like once they’re out very much depends on the person.
Think of it like the light and dark sides of the force: skill in rhetoric can just as easily be used to derail conversations or slide into sophistry as it can to explore the foundations of an idea, argument, or position in search of insight.
Intellectual honesty tends to require a certain restraint from the practitioner, whereas resentment and anger can feed into deliberate conversational malice.
The forms of discourse at St. John’s contribute greatly to earnest inquiry in the classroom setting: the system of formal address, for instance, in which other students are addressed as, say, “Ms. Klein” or “Mr. Armstrong” in class creates an incredible separation between daily life and the classroom - enabling you to treat someone’s statements and arguments at face value.
My experience with St. John’s was that the Tutors (called professors anywhere else) generally managed to guide and keep conversations on track with a light, deft hand on such occasions as intervention was called for - this was increasingly rarely over the course of the Program, however, as keeping things directed and on track was primarily enforced by one’s fellow students, whose urgent pursuit of truth and understanding brooked no interference, and suffered very little foolishness.
My guess is your former coworker was probably just as argumentative before he came to St. John’s as when you met him. The school isn’t formative in the sense of changing your nature; it’s formative in the sense of giving you the tools to better understand the world around you. Most people left with the same personalities and political views they came in with.
On item 2, I did a project back in the 00s where I watched every movie I’d never seen¹ in the imdb top 500 (Netflix DVD and the library were a great resource for getting through this). It was great background for catching jokes that I’d missed on The Simpsons. Cultural literacy is a widely varied thing.
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1. There were a couple that I realized when I watched them that I had seen them, or at least parts of them when I was a kid, most notably Lawrence of Arabia. There were only a handful that felt like a burden to watch, and of those the only one I remember being bored silly by was Jules et Jim.
How long did it take you to read them? Did you read them in order as presented? Did you start with a strategy for retention or comprehension (especially with the non-modern English) so that it wouldn’t be wasted time?
From start to finish it probably took around 7-8 years. The booklist I had, started out pretty easy going (i.e. you were expected to read The Illiad in about 2 weeks), towards the fourth year it is frankly delusional how fast you are expected to read (War and Peace was assigned 1 week) and I have NO idea how the students in the course can do it. I was reading maybe 2 hrs a day whilst working fulltime.
Yes I read them in the order presented. The order kind of makes sense (sem 1 & 2: Ancient Greece, sem 3: Early christianity/rome, sem 4: renaissance, sem5/6: enlightenment, rise of democracy, sem 7/8: early modern period.) By the time you get to Shakespeare there are echoes of stories you have already read.
In terms of a strategy for retention, I kept a small book of quotes from the works and would add to them weekly (no idea where this is now).
I should say that the latter stages of the course has large sections that are for essay writing and projects. I skipped all this but added other books instead. These were mainly American literature (Twain, Fitzgerald, steinbeck), English literature (Bronte, Dickens, Orwell) and some older stuff (Suetonius, Xenophon).
I forget if War and Peace was the first book of a semester or whether it was over spring break, but long novels were typically scheduled so that you had some free time away to read them.
The books me and my friends found to be ass-kickers were the dense philosophy books with many seminars back-to-back, like how there were seven? on Critique of Pure Reason and six? on Phenomenology of the Spirit. Important books, to be sure, but there's a limit to endurance.
Except that list is ... eclectic, to put it politely. If you want to learn maths, I wouldn't recommend Aristotle, Descartes and Darwin.
Perhaps I don't understand what "The information presented is for illustration purposes only and may not reflect the current reading list" means, and why one would link that page anyway.
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 constant pressure to remove those as well.
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 career in their desired field.
If "thinking mathematically" is the actual, vital part of that education, for most students, I have some doubts that a classics-based approach is any worse than the modern kind. Maybe better, except for a small slice of students who will continue to engage with advanced mathematics after they finish undergrad and do need the modern version.
I know I'd prefer a population that understands how to read graphs, what rate of change means, can actually solve a word problem, etc. People are voting on complex topics like tax rates and I think you'd be amazed at how many people can not, and I mean not with a calculator or at all, calculate what 60% of 75 is.
So maybe it's not a bad thing that people graduate from College are required to take a few algebra and stats classes when they're ostensibly running the show at large corporations and in various levels of Government.
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.
St. John's graduate here. It looks like that list includes a lot of what we read in "lab" class mixed in with what we read in math class. Freshman math was almost entirely the study of Euclid and Nicomachus.
I got a Master's degree from St. Johns liberal arts program in my 50s, in part to complement a Master's degree in computer science from three decades earlier, together to help me be a better teacher of high school computing.
For me, the three-decade interval gave me work and life experience which prepared me to read and discuss the Great Books. (The graduate program's list is similar to the undergraduate list, if a bit shorter.) The authors and works we read at St. Johns come from a wide range of contexts with different assumptions than ours, which made them both such a challenge and a reward to study.
There are other "Great Books" programs, including The Catherine Project, https://catherineproject.org/, which give opportunities to read and discuss many of these important works.
I went to St. John's for a year and the math curriculum was the high point by far.
I didn't read the OP and can't vouch for it. the curriculum I got was almost entirely Euclid, plus a little bit of Greek stuff about arcs and sections, which I imagine was Nicomachus per the above comment, and there may have been some stuff about astronomy as well.
but reading Euclid, and doing an entire year of math that doesn't even have numbers until the very end, which was early number theory: just incredible.
I got bored, though, and the later years of the curriculum skew very hard towards European philosophers. the longer you stay there, the more you become justified in summarizing it as a philosophy degree for the sake of convenience.
That's an extremely complicated question for me. I'll talk about each of the classes and offer what thoughts I can:
Math -- without math class at St. Johns I don't think I'd have ever thought I could be a programmer, much less that I could learn it on my own from books and online self-study. I still don't know much about math-as-math, but having a class dedicated to studying proofs and formal logic in various forms and communicating that to a group has been extremely valuable to me in my professional life. So I'm somewhat of a patriot for the math program.
That said, I think the poster in this thread who argues it's "a bad way to learn math" is correct. The St. John's program was founded in 1937, and, let's face it, the world of math and science is different now. If you sat me down next to a math major and made both us do a math test, they'd massacre me.
I'm more critical of the lab program. It felt like a complicated review of high school physics, chemistry, and biology and it was the area where the "amateur" nature of the teaching often hurt, rather than enhanced, the lesson. My thoughts about "the world's moved on since 1937" are even more acute related to lab. I don't feel I was very literate in science after I graduated beyond being able to talk about the Maxwell equations or relativity with some confidence.
Language class is a mixed bag. It's meant to support seminar by giving you access to Greek (and in junior and senior year, French) so that you can dig into some of the original sources. I enjoyed and was good at it -- but it's two years of college French that may make you able to read French literature but unable to order a meal in Paris.
When it comes to the seminar class, I enthusiastically endorse the St. John's method. I don't think there is a better way to read philosophy, history, literature, politics, etc.
Unrelated to the subjects themselves: at the very least, you're spending four years with roughly the same class of <100 people, reading the same texts, doing the same intellectual work, exposing your thoughts in class, living in the same area, eating in the same dining hall. That kind of -- let's call it intimacy -- means you're going to make some pretty deep friendships and rivalries and learn some social skills about getting on in group settings.
Would I recommend it? It's not for everyone. For people who don't need their hand held and who like the idea of reading and talking about a bunch of important books that discuss a lot of important questions in life, I think it's very right. For people who want to prepare for a specific technical career, or who are very shy, or who are not intellectuals by nature, I don't think it's right at all.
The Great Books approach involves reading the actual historical development of a subject and seeing not only what the state of the art is but how we got from here to there.
Johnnie and math Ph.D. here. It's a bad, or at least slow, way to prepare for math or math-heavy graduate school as you'll need to take additional coursework elsewhere in order to be competitive. On the other hand, freshman math at St. John's (Euclid, a bit Apollonius, start into Ptolemy) was for a significant fraction of students in my year the first math class they had ever enjoyed. Euclid's Elements, despite its many inefficiencies, and faults, does not heavily rely on mastery and/or acceptance of earlier curricular material, nor is it designed in service to later curricular material that most students are in no position to anticipate or appreciate.
On the third hand, reading Newton is a really bad way to learn calculus; the college uses a lab manual which more closely resembles a modern calculus course.
It appears to be a liberal arts program. Is this substantially different, with respect to the rigor of mathematics, than most other comparable programs? They might cover more calculus (maybe at a theoretical level?) than most liberal arts programs.
I'd expect the rigor is fine, but the particulars that are learned differ.
I doubt the distinction matters at all for the vast majority of grads, especially ones who don't intend to become mathematicians. Learning how to math is probably more important than the specific material, outside a handful of things. You can pick up the rest as-needed, and for the vast majority of people, "the rest" that is in fact ever needed for the entire rest of their lives, will be very little. Especially if they're pursuing a classics-based liberal arts degree.
I doubt many of their grads are planning to become actual computer-scientists or mathematicians or mech. engineers or any of that. Lawyer, maybe doctor, maybe writer, maybe an ordinary computer programmer, that sort of thing. As long as you're not afraid of math, you'll be fine in any of those not having had a typical PDE class or whatever.
Yes, it is substantially different with respect to content than standard undergraduate mathematics programs. It covers a few historically important texts and does not teach (if those texts are any indication) most of what is usually taught in an undergraduate math degree. (A poster above writes: "Freshman math was almost entirely the study of Euclid and Nicomachus.")
So this is the books used in an undergraduate liberal arts degree (your degree is IN liberal arts). These are the math tagged books in a quirky bachelors in philosophy degree, essentially. They do not have a math degree (or any degrees aside from bachelors in liberal arts?).
I see - I understood "liberal arts program" above to mean a liberal arts college in general (typically offering a mathematics major). I agree that this reading list is better suited for something like "history of math for humanities students."
But consider that they include Hardy's "Mendelian Proportions in a Mixed Population" but not Riemann's "On the Hypotheses Which Lie at the Foundations of Geometry."
Is it actually doing that? Like it seems to have some good stuff for early history - euclid's elements and what not, but i'm not sure what the theme is for the later books, and lots of it seems very applied, or just other sciences that use math and not really about math itself.
That said, i haven't read most of these, so maybe i am wrong.
Aristotle is reasonable because (1) logic and (2) it's going to be a core part of any Great Books curriculum so it's part of the core as opposed to specifically "mathematics". But if you're going to read Aristotle and Russell with the justification "logic", you must include Goedel and Hilbert.
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.
We actually read some Descartes in math-- some of the papers from which we get the term "Cartesian coordinates."
What he does in those papers fascinating, but has very little to do with the way that we learn and use Cartesian coordinates.
(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 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.
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 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.
Yeah, Euclid is important. It should be studied carefully in any Great Books program. But there's a lot of other important stuff to talk about and the extreme emphasis on Euclidean constructions is IMO a bit of a shibboleth.
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.
I don't think the point of any great books program is to finish and say "You have now read everything of relevance, no need to read anymore." The curricula are broad and general so that if you have particular interests in a field you are now equipped to read all of the texts you mentioned on your own. If there was a specific "Great Mathematics Books" curriculum perhaps all the ones you mentioned would indeed be required.
Logic goes back. Could have stuff from Babbage, too. I definitely feel SJ would appreciate an old school style math proof exposition even perhaps between mathematicians. (Forgetting any specifics as it’s been way too long.) Notably, NM does have solid math departments to invite for lectures.
I always got the impression SJ is more about an “originalism” towards knowledge. But of course they’re going to have to pick and choose. Maybe it’s time for them to revisit math and add computing.
Edit-read the math curriculum. They threw Darwin, Feynman, and Einstein into there as electives. Seems a little of a catch-all. Also they could add Shannon entropy.
this is not intended as any kind of rebuttal, but the Santa Fe campus of St. John's has an Asian classics graduate degree which brings in some missing material from the Indian subcontinent (and elsewhere, of course, but you specifically mentioned India).
I don't recall if it addresses math in particular, however. my guess is no. the grad school is kind of eager about granting people excuses to skip math, and I get the impression that they have to be, because otherwise they'd go out of business.
anyway, if you did both that degree and the undergraduate degree, you could claim a more credible, globe-spanning Great Books education, although it would still have plenty of caveats and flaws.
You're right that pre-20th c. math works were quite weird from a modern standpoint. The huge development of mathematical abstraction (and, to some extent, computation) since then has meant that many and perhaps most of the topics that research mathematicians were interested in back in the 19th c. would now be considered boring and sometimes trivial.
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.
> "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.
The webpage clearly states that the list is of foundational books of greco-roman civilization. And SJC is an american university. What do you expect?
Also, fetishism? Greek classics are the foundation of european civilization. That's like going to a christian seminary and whining about their fetishism of the bible.
> 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.
The foundation of european mathematics goes back to the ancient greeks. It's a foundational books list.
> Russell is predictably floating around (see paragraph 1) even though... well, yawn.
Yeah, yeah, Evropean, we get it. You know that even SJC grads eye-roll at that stuff, right? One of them even does in this comment section.
Anyways. Even then -- typical Great Books curricula still sample from a tiny subset of literature that fits the mold of "greco-roman civilization". It was chosen by a very particular set of people at a very particular point in time. Some choices work more or less well enough. Others not so much.
The choices for what to emphasize in Natural Philosophy and Mathematics are mostly bad imo. They reflect what a 1920s humanist might conceive of as a Great Book in those fields. Which is to say, mostly weird and sort of mired in a very particular 1850s Oxbridge sensibility that most people don't even realize is being read into the whole project.
And here's the issue: those guys had well-informed opinions on what to emphasize in Philosophy and History. We can agree to disagree, or not, whatever. But in Mathematics and Science, they were barely following the plot or even already ossified in their own lifetimes. And that was a century ago. The choices there aren't a matter of opinion. They are just... bad.
>> > Russell... yawn
> Are you serious?
First of all, the text listed is his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. It's literally a 1920s textbook on Mathematical Philosophy. It is what it is. Doesn't really belong in a Great Books curriculum, imo, but the indignation at the idea that it's a yawnfest (too verbose) is kinda weird. It's... a textbook. Yawn.
Second, the indignation at Russell being a yawnfest in general made me LOL. Principia Mathematica is WAY less readable than the yellow pages.
Third, if you're including Russell as part of your coverage of Foundations -- but also excluding Goedel and Church and Turing and Hilbert -- then you're doing it horribly wrong! Russell is the foil in this plot, and a horribly pedantic and boring one at that. Not that a Great Books curriculum would ever treat Russell as a foil ;-)
Fourth, to the stuff you probably assumed was being included from Russell: I also found Russell's History boring and at some moments annoyingly preachy/opinionated for a History. Even his more red meat-y opinion stuff is... important for understanding the development of a certain strand of modern intellectualism. That's not meant to be dismissive; I'm in that strand!!! But let's just say not what I'd spend my best years pouring over.
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_) education:
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_).
It's an interesting approach. They do like the classic sources.
I've at least skimmed more than half of those titles, long after college.
It's amusing that they have students read Pikkety's "Capital" before Marx's "Capital".
You don't want to learn geometry from Euclid. You read Euclid after you already know geometry, to see how he built it up. Similarly, you don't want to learn calculus from Newton. Or physics from Aristotle. What you're seeing there is people trying to figure something out before the tools for the job were developed.
There are great papers in engineering, where a theoretical advance changed the world. They're not well known. These should be as well known as the "Great Books".
* Maxwell's paper "On Governors". In a few pages, he invents feedback control theory. People were building steam engine governors but didn't understand stability and lag. It's a milestone in that it's one of the first times abstract math met practical engineering and the result worked.
* Shannon's discovery that telephone toll switches could be reduced from needing O(N^2) relays to O(N log N) was one. Suddenly, combinatorics went from a useless abstraction to a huge financial win for AT&T.
* "Rational Psychrometric Formulae", by Willis Carrier. Least click-bait title ever.
Basis of air conditioning. It's how you make an air conditioner and control both temperature and humidity at the cold end, rather than getting cold, humid air out.
* Von Neumann's Report on the EDVAC. That's better known. It's how to make a CPU. He got all the basic architecture right, except for index registers.
Is Euclid just about geometry? I have not read it, but others have written it is a good introduction to mathematical proofs. A few comments on HN over the years said Hammack's "Book Of Proof" or Velleman's "How To Prove It" are more thorough, but are intended for 3rd/4th year math undergrad, and Euclid is easier to get through.
My last math course was stats and business calc about 30 years ago.
Are you looking for a book to learn proofs from? Are you looking to learn any math topics in particular?
I think you can go through any of the books you listed and get an understanding of proofs. The proofs books usually use basic number theory or set theory for examples because the point is to learn the logic and structure of proofs. (If the book isn't enough for you, you can use Khan Academy as a refresher.) Learning more math is left to other books.
I looked through the table of contents for the ones you've linked, but neither looks like an upper year math book. Typically, if there is an explicit course on proofs, it's covered in the lower division.
The proofs course I took used "Mathematical Proofs: A Transition to Advanced Mathematics" by Chartrand, Polimeni, and Zhang. It's ridiculously expensive on Amazon right now, so I'm not sure I can recommend it for the cost. But it does cover more areas of math using proofs. It covers proofs in set theory, number theory, combinatorics, calculus, and group theory at a very basic level. The books you linked seem to cover less of those topics, so I think Chartrand et al. is a more gentle intro to different branches of upper division math.
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.
Books 1, 2 and 6 are plane geometry, books 3 and 4 are what we now call trig, book 5 is on what we now call real numbers, books 7-9 are on integer number theory, book 10 is on irrationals, and books 11-13 are on solid geometry.
Those are excellent suggestions. I think we are probably at the point where you could do a Great Books curriculum in Computer Science. Would be interesting to put together that list: 10-20 foundational primary texts in Algorithms, Programming/Software Engineering, Logic, AI, and Computer Architecture.
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.
> I think we are probably at the point where you could do a Great Books curriculum in Computer Science. Would be interesting to put together that list: 10-20 foundational primary texts in Algorithms, Programming/Software Engineering, Logic, AI, and Computer Architecture.
I graduated before Piketty wrote Capital, but that sounded weird so I looked. All the "Elective Work(s)" at the bottom of Junior and Senior years are part of the Junior/Senior elective preceptorials which not every student reads and that list changes every year. The Program definitely doesn't have you read Piketty before Marx.
Class of '87 here.
Most valuable takeaway is that you can read almost _anything_ directly or in translation. You don't need to read a summary of Hegel, you can read Hegel. You don't need to read an article about a Supreme Court case like Marbury v. Madison, you can read the case itself.
When you go into technology, you're then willing to dive into the guts of the actual docs instead of waiting for a book or blog post about it.
Another way it prepares you for tech-- understanding philosophy is the skill of drawing incredibly fine distinctions between things. Designing software is also the skill of drawing incredibly fine distinctions between things. Having years of experience in arguing these incredibly fine distinctions was a huge leg up fr me when I was getting started, and remains useful to this day.
I think that the careers of my graduating class are primarily in software, law, academia, and medicine.
Funny things about it - there are a lot of places where your undergrad experience just doesn't overlap with that of people who didn't go there. Everyone studies the same thing at SJC, so if I meet a Johnny who went there years after me or years before, I can tell them what I did for my senior thesis and they'll have a similar reaction - why the hell did you do that?
It's also _extremely_ small, so if they went there during the same years I did, I almost certainly know them.
The original-works thing works gangbusters on philosophy, science, and literature, and breaks down a little in math. You spend a frustrating amount of time doing Ptolemaic astronomy, because it's an excellent classical treatment of trigonometry. You study Newton for calculus, but you don't actually learn anything that the modern world thinks of as calculus from Newton, so you study supplemental materials that teach you derivatives and integrals over algebraic expressions.
It's culturally pretty liberal on the inside, although it's bizarrely worshipped by some right-wingers who didn't go there because of the curriculum's focus on works from the European tradition.
> Most valuable takeaway is that you can read almost _anything_ directly or in translation. You don't need to read a summary of Hegel, you can read Hegel. You don't need to read an article about a Supreme Court case like Marbury v. Madison, you can read the case itself.
I think what's under-appreciated is that, a fair amount of the time, for these sorts of enduring classics, reading the original is both better and easier than reading later takes on the same material. If you read the later derivative works and go back, often you'll find they've misinterpreted certain parts in strange ways, or left out things that seem important, and the original is not-uncommonly also both an easier and more entertaining read.
And that in some cases they assume familiarity with a large body of knowledge of _other_ people's commentaries on the works, and in fact, those second-hand sources are what they're really responding to.
I stayed at St. John's one summer and I remember they had a "final" where they had to solve geometric problems by actually drawing the proofs on a chalk board, shapes and all. I watched that girl go through the whole process while studying and I was fascinated.
That's what you do literally every day in math - take turns going to the board and working through proofs.
Ptolemy is Waterloo for anyone who has trouble drawing big circles.
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
Same. If I could do it over again, I’d much rather go through a program like this than the engineering program I went through. Nothing I learned is relevant to world of software (even the software classes I took lol). I’ve had to go through all the classical liberal arts education knowledge through my own independent study.
Was a little disappointed to see so little from the east in terms of recommended books. The Bhagavad Gita and ZhuangXi made the list, but nothing in terms of other important works by the Buddha, or Yoga or the epics like the Mahabharata.
If someone were to read some of the Upanishadic works, it would be really interesting to see their influence on the works of Plotinus, etc.
The College offers a Master’s degree in Eastern Classics, applying the same approach to a literary tradition which, while it intersects with and interacts with the Western tradition, easily also stands on its own:
https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/graduate/masters-easte...
The monolithic, slow-to-change Great Books list that forms the core of the St John’s undergraduate Reading List is famously and self-consciously concerned primarily and narrowly with the Western intellectual tradition that informed the Founding Fathers, etc. - so as, in the creators’ thinking, to prepare graduates for citizenship in a liberal democracy.
It’s likely no one is more critical of the List than the students and faculty, who argue constantly over omissions, additions, and alterations (there is barely enough time to read all the works on the Program, so for each added, one must often be taken out).
The historical context of the creation of the Reading List accounts for its significant bias towards dead white cis men, as the creators of the list were themselves white cis men at a time when the American education system was not integrated.
(You may be pleased to hear that, for at least the last several decades, the college has admitted people of all colors and genders!)
Yes, makes sense. It just struck me that someone who graduates from such a learning list might totally miss that eastern thought heavily influenced the Greek philosophers and the practice of Gnosis, derived from the Sanskrit root word Gnana(Knowledge or wisdom).
When investigated down to the fundamentals, it is liberating to realize all the deep enquirers of all regions of the world arrived at many of the same insights regarding life. This hopefully leads to more unity, tolerance and mutual respect between people and different religions.
True, but the name of the school predates the curriculum in question by more than a century; the school has for many years been in no way associated with any religion.
(Likewise, at its founding in 1696, the college was called King William’s School; a name that probably sounded a bit off in post-Revolutionary America, leading to the adoption of the current name in 1784, a year after the War.)
About fiften years ago I was reading child development books. I discovered this wonderful thinker Jean Piaget.
I think Piaget's first book translated into English caused a great deal of excitement, especially at the University of Chicago. Piaget's book "The Language and thought of the Child" I conjecture was the inspiration for organizing a school around a great books list and also for teaching mathematics by the demonstration and discussion method.
At St. John's the freshman math tutorial meant each student stood up, drew a triangle, lettered the corners, and recited the proof and discussed and explored the ideas and assumptions.
For myself at St. John's the great books seminar became a very slow process of analyzing and trying to restate writings. By the end of the Junior year, my final academic review called a Don Rag I can say It Did Not Go Well ("what happened Lee?").
Regarding the math side of things, a few years later I got a technician job at Cal Tech and I was allowed to enroll in Cal Tech a calculus class. By November I was dreaming of flying, I swooped on updrafts of assumptions and bold substitutions and clever identities.
I couldn't solve the winter mid term exam problem but to this day I am grateful that I saw and did the two extremes of math.
These days, I don't do much Calculus, but I do and think about knot theory and coiling. I keep stumbling across pi/2 as I coil or fold air hoses or ropes. Why must three utility pipes connecting to three houses cross? Why are the computer wires always a tangle"?
Regarding the Great Books, I recommend the Meno and then the Socratic big 5. These books are still a source of puzzlement to me.
A final question: What happens in the brain when a student stands up and does a proof at the black board? Why do opera singers stand up to sing? Why is standing up to walk a neurological milestone in the development of the child?
Have always been fascinated by this school, had a hankering to do to their Graduate program which is a shortened version of their undergrad Curriculum.
I live in Santa Fe, and have gone by this campus many times since theres a pretty cool bike trail that runs behind the campus.
I got curious once and looked up what it's like to study there and discovered the "great books" curriculum. These days I'm in my 40s and have a successful computer science career, so there is nothing to gain from enrolling in this program, but if I were to ever enroll in school again, it would probably be this program or one like it.
When I was in school, what I really hated most about it was how common it was for professors to make the class about them. In a program like St. Johns, the curriculum is set in stone, and so there is very little room for the professor to inject himself into the class. When I was in undergrad in the early 2000s, if you disagreed with the professor, you'd be seen as being disrespectful or disruptive and your grade would suffer. I have a feeling that wouldn't be a problem at St. Johns.
Yes, it's missing crucial works like Cur Deus Homo and On the Incarnation by St Athanasius as well as some of the ones you mention, but I think some of those are in the curriculum if you look a little harder. One needn't be a Christian to benefit from such works; they are foundational to Western civilisation.
Confessions is on the program Sophomore year, as are excerpts from Summa Theologica. I vaguely remember one of the differences between the campuses being that Annapolis students read some Calvin and Santa Fe students read something else, but I don't remember what it was.
It’s a bit better than I expected although it does seem odd that everything in the first two years is very Eurocentric. It’s only in the third year are students exposed to anything by Asian authors (and there’s some cheating there in that the Dao de jing is listed twice—no, wait, three times!) and those are all under the category of elective works.
I’m frankly unconvinced of the value of reading historical works of science or mathematics, especially those written before modern notation came into usage—without additional explicatory apparatus, the text would be exceptionally opaque.
I'm all for learning more about the historical roots and overall development of Western culture, but one should keep in mind that the sheer amount of notable works that have been described as "classics" and "Great Books" is absolutely humongous; this list is of course highly selective and will necessarily be missing a lot of interesting stuff. In general, most people will probably want to focus on the narrower subtopics that specifically draw their interest, and perhaps explore the interconnections among works in that area.
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 two really good books… * How to Read a Book and How To Speak How To Listen.
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.
I have read many of these works listed. I don't like this database-looking list format; too many books there. Some of them are quite challenging.
Freshman Reading: Homer - Illyad, Odyssey ... ok! if you read the Odyssey in your own native language (not greek), you probably will enjoy it, but how are you going to know about the grand themes unless someone tells you about it?
seems sad in a way that these great works are reduced to a list item
> how are you going to know about the grand themes unless someone tells you about it?
SJC grad here. The Program encourages you to encounter the works for yourself and see what _you_ think the themes/ideas are.
You’re lightly discouraged from reading the translator’s preface, since they share their own opinions. Different students bring different translations of the material, and additionally the language class that lasts all 4 years of undergrad is basically asking what translation is, is it possible.
Is it better to have read them and missed the themes or not to have read them at all?
Background: read both Iliad and odyssey in children's section of library in the 5th grade. Also read most of one of them in an honors philosophy class in college. Can't remember which. Recalled the scene where they were throwing Trojans off the walls after defeating the city when I made a hard tackle in rugby, driving my enemy into the ground.
> how are you going to know about the grand themes unless someone tells you about it?
For that matter, St. John’s students self-select to be the kind of students who would appreciate being guided to discover the major themes. Most other students need to be told them and then think themes are pretentious puffery because they lack the life experience to recognize or appreciate them.
> Freshman Reading: Homer - Illyad, Odyssey ... ok! if you read the Odyssey in your own native language (not greek), you probably will enjoy it, but how are you going to know about the grand themes unless someone tells you about it?
Isn't there a class instruction, supplementary reading, and discussion component for these books? I assume so.
But I think a lot of people — even freshmen! — could just read these books and get something from them anyway.
Talking about them in a small class of people who read the same thing at the same time, led by 1 or 2 professors who are practiced in _not_ acting like more than advanced students, is _really_ different from just reading the book.
I'd read _Pride and Prejudice_ many times before the seminar on it, and I could not have predicted what other people saw in the book and wanted to talk about with a pile of postit notes, a ball of red yarn, and ten hours in front of a big wall.
In fairness you are simultaneously learning ancient Greek, and the translation exercises include a good deal of Homer. That said the ancient Greek pedagogy is particularly weird there.
Brother of an acquaintance was going there when I was thinking about college (Santa Fe campus). Before talking to him, I was pretty interested. After, I kind of had the impression there was more weed than reading and didn't apply. (No idea if it was just his circle really. And don't take as huge opinion on weed, even second hand the smoke can get to my nose pretty badly.)
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.
Tried to get my oldest to go here. She reads super fast with high comprehension and loves to debate, but she's so terrified of going into debt that she's now in a state college taking computer science and saying Chat GPT is way more helpful than her professor for understanding or fixing code.
Yes, the cost is unfortunate. They do have grants and scholarships that can save a few thousand per semester, but that’s still not enough if you don’t have at least some college funds set aside.
If it's cheap enough, the paper's worth it just to never worry about having to explain your lacking a degree. Even if you rarely actually have to, it's always in the back of your mind. A potential question that you'll need to be ready to reframe positively, plus that constant worry that you're receiving extra scrutiny, just... go away completely.
It'll also be very handy if one ever wishes to leave the US—most countries one might want to live and work in will be much more likely to let you in with a degree, and especially a CS degree.
I went back and finished mine. Removing that stressor from interviews was worth it, even if that was basically the only benefit, which it was—nearly all the benefits I can point to from college came from the humanities degree I nearly finished, years before completing the CS degree. For the CS degree, perhaps two or three hours worth of instruction or material have proven either useful or edifying since. But, I'm glad to have the paper.
Do they genuinely expect someone in their third year of undergraduate study to read and even partially understand Newton's Principia Mathematica? It is famously unintelligible to modern readers, even those with knowledge of physics.
As can be detected by the disdain that other commenters have shown towards even the suggestion that someone might read the Principia Mathematica as opposed to a more modern treatment of the same subject, it is a lack of interest more than a lack of capacity that makes it unintelligible for modern readers. It is utterly comprehensible to any reader who has time, paper and pencil, and a copy of Euclid.
A former partner of mine was a St. John's alum (and champion), so I heard a lot about and thought a lot about their undergraduate program.
Of course this is a wonderful list of brilliant works. I don't know if reading nothing but primary sources is the most efficient way to become a critical thinker or knowledgeable (e.g. reading Euclid might be a treat for those who know geometry, but is it the ideal way to learn geometry?), but it certainly sounds like a great way to become cultured and a great way to spend four years, given the chance.
My feeling was also that such a heavy emphasis on classical (Western!) thought and works does its students a bit of a disservice. This is a little dramatic, but I'd say a very serious view in the postmodern, post-WWII academy is that the culmination of 3000 years of Western culture, in the country that was considered by many to be at the height of Western civilization, turned out to be the Holocaust, and that so deeply fetishizing "the canon" is problematic for that reason and others. Without dismissing the greatness of anything on this list, it's unfortunate that it's not until the third or fourth years that you start to see stuff from outside the European tradition, in very limited numbers, often just as electives. There seems to be a decent selection of works reckoning with American slavery, which is good, but if I recall and AFAICT not much about European colonialism, the Holocaust, CIA-backed coups in South America, the horrors of Stalinism, rising Asian powers, the postmodern condition, any post-sexual revolution gender politics...a robust knowledge of the Greeks is all well and good, but I don't know if that's enough to be a well-rounded citizen of the world, these days.
Do I really need to spell it out? Or do you consider it all equally edgy? The obvious candidate is "the culmination of 3000 years of Western culture [is] the Holocaust". Although, I must admit, the weird mixture of other points also makes good candidates. E.g., the relation between education and "CIA-backed coups in South America" is one which seems to spring from a conspiracy theory.
And, it completely ignores the achievements of "Western thought", as well as the barbaric actions that have taken place elsewhere, from Turkey to Japan, while simultaneously suggesting their thinkers should be read.
> There seems to be a decent selection of works reckoning with American slavery, which is good, but if I recall and AFAICT not much about European colonialism, the Holocaust, CIA-backed coups in South America, the horrors of Stalinism, rising Asian powers, the postmodern condition, any post-sexual revolution gender politics...a robust knowledge of the Greeks is all well and good, but I don't know if that's enough to be a well-rounded citizen of the world, these days.
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.
I was about to say something along the lines you did. The idea behind a curriculum like this is that, after studying the Greeks, you will be far better equipped to grapple with something like “post-sexual revolution gender politics” than a graduate of a more mainstream school who majored in gender studies or something. The problems never change, only the labels we attach to them. The thing is to know how to think and how to talk.
Right, it's about foundational concepts and frameworks. Sure you can jump to Rawls (not that the folks who've been arrested so far back that a skim of a few pages of Plato would be enlightening are likely to have done that, either) but you'll miss a bunch and won't wrestle with him as well, if you do. You can always read him, and de Beauvoir, and et c., et c., later—and you'll be so much better equipped to read them if you've got a half-decent foundation in the basics, in the very language and idiom, of intellectual Western (at least) writing—of how to read, how to really read—first.
There's nothing stopping you from digging deep into modern social justice or anti-colonialism or whatever after you graduate—and I'd wager St. John's grads are more likely to do exactly that, and to do so more profitably, than most. Anyway, it's not as if either of those began in the 20th century....
The greatest weakness of the school is that the list of works was compiled in 1922 and has changed only incrementally since.
It's also a great _strength_ of the school, but you could enter the world in 1988 from SJC knowing absolutely nothing about it. I'm sure that that's still true now.
And, for all the talk of timelessness, the list was already quite reactionary in 1922. Vaguely Amish, in some sense, tbh.
I do really like the pedagogical approach. I just wish that approach to learning and teaching could move on from a very particular cultural moment in pre-war Britain/America. All those crusty Oxbridge guys who had Strong Feelings about reading tons of Euclid were reacting to their own cultural moments and have now been dead for half a century :)
You're right, that view is "a little" dramatic. The Holocaust proposition was maybe more defensible 20 years ago when we could still look at Third World with rose-colored glasses.
Nowadays, I think if someone argues along the lines of "3,000 years of Western culture culminated in the Holocaust," they should also consider that the same logic leads to "5,000 years of Chinese culture culminated in the ongoing genocides in Xinjiang and Tibet" or "1,400 years of Muslim culture culminated in 9/11" or any number of other such propositions that I think most thinking people can see are problematic. Those things happen in spite of, not because of, the broader cultural/intellectual canons.
The notion that there exist, to any meaningful degree, philosophies or cultures that will not produce atrocities on a pretty regular schedule, is something a decent education ought to rid one of.
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.
> The notion that there exist, to any meaningful degree, philosophies or cultures that will not produce atrocities on a pretty regular schedule, is something a decent education ought to rid one of.
This is precisely what I'm saying, though. It was a predominant mood in the pre-war time that European society was enlightened and modern and superior to all others, and that this was a consequence of a Great History of Ideas starting from The Bible and Plato, finally coming to fruition in the then-present. It's absurd to believe these things about European civilization - or any known civilization! - but that's what people did.
I think it's clear by all the times I praised this "wonderful list of brilliant works", calling it "a great way to become cultured and a great way to spend four years", that I'm not trying to "indict" the Western tradition. There's a vast gulf between arguing that "deeply fetishizing [it] is problematic" and condemning it outright.
I really disagree with the implication. It’s not like Hitler or the slavers were well read in their Greek philosophy. Traditionally — and I hope going into the future — the classical works of western civ have been a source of enduring liberalism. They show the value and meaning of freedom — and nuanced, complex, non-black/white thought.
But of course I’m biased because I’m deeply immersed in the classics—and I draw from it regularly. I find it troubling that people feel comfortable portraying classical civ as Nazi fodder…
Which "slavers" are you referring to? Almost all of the American Founding Fathers owned slaves, and they were of course very familiar with the tradition of liberal thought.
I can't speak for Hitler's knowledge of the Greeks specifically, but he was democratically elected by the nation of Germany, which - like I mentioned - was considered to be one of the most "civilized" in Europe (and thus the world). It's easy enough to draw a line from Hegel or Nietzsche - both on this list - to Nazism, after all. It's even easier to draw a line from Heidegger to Nazism, and he's also on this list.
Hitler was only sort of democratically elected. He lost the direct vote for president by a landslide against Hindenburg. Later, his party became the largest in parliament though without a majority (37%). He was only made chancellor after another election were his party lost ground (33%), through a backroom deal.
Hitler's highest formal education was finishing secondary school.
Not disputing that. It's just important to know the historical context and not give the wrong impression when saying "he was democratically elected". He was, in the sense that in representative democracy a vote for a party often in fact is a vote for a particular politician. But he was not in the sense of a direct, personal democratic election.
It's also important to be aware that Hitler, at the point he became chancellor, had already served a prison sentence for high treason for trying to abolish parliamentary republic in the Munich putsch. Those were highly unusual and tumultuous times, after all.
> There seems to be a decent selection of works reckoning with American slavery, which is good, but if I recall and AFAICT not much about European colonialism, the Holocaust, CIA-backed coups in South America, the horrors of Stalinism, rising Asian powers, the postmodern condition, any post-sexual revolution gender politics
Not much about Japanese horrors in WWII, Chinese imperialism, Mongol raids, African-originated slave traders, African tribal genocides, machismo anti-homosexual Latino culture either.
Just seems you forgot to mention these for some reason. Maybe because the culmination of 3000 years of Asian, Africa, and South American history isn't utopia either?
I think the read that you and some others are getting out of my post is that "the Western tradition is bad", which wasn't the intention - I repeatedly praised the works, after all! And to be fair there's lots of outspoken, stupid voices in the so-called culture wars that do say things like that, so I see why you might've made the assumption.
The point I was trying to make is that - contra to many prevailing modernist attitudes at the time - is that the Western tradition alone won't lead us to utopia, shield us from atrocities, make us enlightened and peaceful, bring us to The Blissful End of History. This is not to say that the Western tradition is bad; it's to say that it's still a work-in-progress, a thing to be interrogated and questioned, something we can look outside of; not a calcified list of hundreds-of-years-old Great Works which, upon reading, will automatically confer greatness.
I found that reading so much ancient literature:
1. It ruined a lot of popular Hollywood movies for me as a lot of the modern stories are retellings of very old ones.
2. I finally got a whole lot of cultural references in modern literature that I missed previously. Many modern authors will name a character in a text as a callback to some old story (rocinante in 'the expanse' comes to mind).
3. I thought reading so much content would improve my reading speed, but since most of what i read was in weird greek prose, conversational aristotlean, iambic pentameter, or ye ole english it really didn't.