Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
T. S. Eliot
Four Quartets
Briunt Norton

Monday, November 9, 2009

Great Books List from Wikipedia

Wiki's choices are not too bad. I suspect a Christian would want to supplement, i.e., many on this list will not age as well as C. S. Lewis.
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; Two New Sciences
Johannes Kepler: The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Harmonices Mundi
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: A Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Some 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"; A Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; "A Modest Proposal"
William Congreve: The Way of the World
George Berkeley: Treatise Concerning the 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, 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, Groundwork 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: Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (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; On Love
Lord Byron: Don Juan
Arthur Schopenhauer: Studies in Pessimism
Michael Faraday: The 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; 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

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