Great books


Great books are written publications that have been accepted by modern day scholars as the essential foundation of literature in Western culture. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines them as certain classics of literature, philosophy, history, and science that are believed to contain the basic ideas of western culture. Over the years it has become customary for institutes of higher education to incorporate these readings into their curriculum.“The reason for the study of these classical texts is to both allow and encourage students to become familiar with some of the most revered  authors throughout history. This helps to ensure that students and newly found scholars are equipped with a plethora of resources to utilize throughout their studies.
The great books are used in conjunction with literary classes in higher education courses, but are often taught in separate subcategories designed for the tone of the intended learning environment. Mortimer Adler used 500 books, out of the list of 517 books within the conglomeration of mixed titles, to teach his pupils expanded literary knowledge past that of their current generation. While Adler stuck to the original list, with a few differences to some novels, many chose to omit many of these titles in order to suit an undergraduate class semester by allowing for only 130 books, such as Torrey Honors Institute. For more thorough literary criticisms, people such as Harold Bloom have comprised lists of volumes including up to 2400 books of differing natures.

Concept

The great books are those that tradition, and various institutions and authorities, have regarded as constituting or best expressing the foundations of Western culture ; derivatively the term also refers to a curriculum or method of education based around a list of such books. Mortimer Adler lists three criteria for including a book on the list:
, well known for his interest in higher education, frequently composed great books lists for his friends and correspondents, for example, for Peter Carr in 1785 and again in 1787.
In 1909, Harvard University published a 51-volume Great Books series, titled the Harvard Classics. These volumes are now in the public domain.
The Great Books of the Western World 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, 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, Jacques Barzun, 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, which caused educational theorists like Sidney Hook and John Dewey to disagree with the premise that there was crossover in education.

Program

The Great Books Program is a curriculum that makes use of this list of texts.The program is designed to teach students to focus solely on using primary sources for material, while leaving little room for secondary source material. It allows emphasis to be put on open discussion, rather than onlooking or overbearing guidance from a professor, facilitator, or tutor in order to further the drive to learn on one's own. This is further studied through the writing of academic papers based upon these principles so that more is discussed, but also completely researched and accurate.
In 1920, Professor Erskine taught the first course based on the "Great Books" program, titled "General Honors", at Columbia University, and helped mould its core curriculum. The course, however, initially began to fail shortly after its introduction due to numerous disputes between senior faculty over the best way to conduct classes, as well as concerns about the rigour of said courses. This resulted in junior faculty, including Mark Van Doren and Mortimer Adler after 1923, teaching parts of the course. The course was discontinued in 1928, though later reinstated. Adler left for the University of Chicago in 1929, where he continued his work on the theme, and along with the University president, Robert M. Hutchins, held an annual seminar of great books. In 1937, when Mark Van Doren redesigned the course, it was already being taught at St. John's College, Annapolis, in addition to the University of Chicago. This course was later named Humanities A for freshmen, and then subsequently evolved into Literature Humanities. Survivors, however, include Columbia's Core Curriculum, the Common Core at Chicago, and the Core Curriculum at Boston University, each heavily focused on the "great books" of the Western canon.
Modern day university and college Great Books Programs are inspired by the Great Books movement that began in the United States during the 1920s. The aim of such programs is a return to the Western Liberal Arts tradition in education, as a correction to the extreme disciplinary specializations common within the academy. The essential component of such programs is a high degree of engagement with whole primary texts, the Great Books. The curricula of Great Books programs often follow a canon of texts considered more or less essential to a student's education, such as Plato's Republic, or Dante's Divine Comedy. Such programs often focus exclusively on Western culture. Their employment of primary texts dictates an interdisciplinary approach, as most of the Great Books do not fall neatly under the prerogative of a single contemporary academic discipline. Great Books programs often include designated discussion groups as well as lectures, and have small class sizes. In general students in such programs receive an abnormally high degree of attention from their professors, as part of the overall aim of fostering a community of learning.
There are only a few true "Great Books Programs" still in operation. These schools focus almost exclusively on the Great Books Curriculum throughout enrolment and do not offer classes analogous to those commonly offered at other colleges. The first, and most well known, of these schools is St. John's College in Annapolis and Santa Fe ; it was followed by Shimer College in Chicago, the Integral Program at Saint Mary's College of California, Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, California, Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in Warner, New Hampshire. More recent schools with this type of curriculum include New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, Gutenberg College in Eugene, Oregon, Harrison Middleton University in Tempe, Arizona, Wyoming Catholic College in Lander, Wyoming, and Imago Dei College in Oak Glen, California. Fordham University's Honors Program at Rose Hill incorporates the Great Books curriculum into a rigorous first four semesters in the program. Loyola University Chicago's Honors Program combines a Great Books curriculum with additional elective classes on subjects not covered in traditional Western thought over a rigorous four year program. The University of Notre Dame's Program of Liberal Studies, established in 1950, is a highly regarded Great Books Program that operates as a separate institution within the College of Liberal Arts. Dharma Realm Buddhist University is the first Great Books school to offer curriculum combining Eastern and Western classics.
The Center for the Study of the Great Ideas advances the Great Conversation found in the Great Books by providing Adler's guidance, and resource materials through both live and on-line seminars, educational and philosophical consultation, international presence on the Internet, access to the Center's library collection of books, essays, articles, journals and audio/video programs. Center programs are unique in that they do not replicate other existing programs either started or developed by Adler.

Universities

Over 100 institutions of higher learning in the United States, Canada, and Europe maintain some version of a Great Books Program as an option for students. Among these are:
United States
Canada
Europe
Asia
In contemporary scholarship, the Great Books curriculum was drawn into the popular debate about multiculturalism, traditional education, the "culture war," and the role of the intellectual in American life. Many had issue with the lack of culture added to this list in both the first and second editions due to its lack of diversity in ethnic origin, as many Hispanic and African American documents were overlooked because they did not meet the ideals, of the Great ideas that the chosen texts had to meet a total of 25 of at the least, to be considered as Great books. Much of this debate centered on reactions to the publication of The Closing of the American Mind in 1987 by Allan Bloom. In his book, Allan Bloom suggested that the shortcomings of teaching the methods of the Great books is that it focuses primarily on historical reading without allowing for point of view of the reader in today’s day in age. He argued that this limited the ability for our knowledge to grow, given that no perspective was given in regards to the advancement of civilization past the date of these books.

Series

The Great Books of the Western World is a hardcover 60-volume collection of the books on the Great Books list. 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. The collection is available from Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., which owns the copyright.
Shortly after Adler retired from the Great Books Foundation in 1989, a second edition of the Great Books of the Western World was published; it included more Hispanic and female authors and, for the first time, works by black authors. During his tenure as president of the Foundation, Adler had resisted such additions.
The following is an example list, in chronological order, compiled from How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler, and How to Read a Book, 2nd ed. by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren :
Ancient :
  1. Homer – Iliad; Odyssey
  2. The Old Testament
  3. Aeschylus – Tragedies
  4. Sophocles – Tragedies
  5. Herodotus – Histories
  6. Euripides – Tragedies
  7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War
  8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings
  9. Aristophanes – Comedies
  10. Plato – Dialogues
  11. Aristotle – Works
  12. Epicurus – "Letter to Herodotus"; "Letter to Menoecus"
  13. Euclid – Elements
  14. Archimedes – Works
  15. Apollonius – Conics
  16. Cicero – Works
  17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things
  18. Virgil – Works
  19. Horace – Works
  20. Livy – History of Rome
  21. Ovid – Works
  22. Quintilian – Institutes of Oratory
  23. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia
  24. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola; Germania; Dialogus de oratoribus
  25. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic
  26. Epictetus – Discourses; Enchiridion
  27. Ptolemy – Almagest
  28. Lucian – Works
  29. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
  30. Galen –
  31. The New Testament
  32. Plotinus – The Enneads
  33. St. Augustine – "On the Teacher"; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
Medieval :
  2. The Volsungs Saga or Nibelungenlied
  3. The Song of Roland
  4. The Saga of Burnt Njál
  5. Maimonides – The Guide for the Perplexed
  6. St. Thomas Aquinas – Of Being and Essence; Summa Contra Gentiles; Of the Governance of Rulers; Summa Theologica
  7. Dante Alighieri – The New Life ; "On Monarchy"; Divine Comedy
  8. Giovanni Boccaccio - The Decameron
  9. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
  10. Thomas à Kempis – The Imitation of Christ
Modern :
  2. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks
  3. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
  4. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly; Colloquies
  5. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
  6. Thomas More – Utopia
  7. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises
  8. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel
  9. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion
  10. Michel de Montaigne – Essays
  11. William Gilbert – On the Lodestone and Magnetic Bodies
  12. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote
  13. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
  14. Francis Bacon – Essays; The Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum; New Atlantis
  15. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays
  16. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Two New Sciences
  17. Johannes Kepler – The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Harmonices Mundi
  18. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; Generation of Animals
  19. Grotius – The Law of War and Peace
  20. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan; Elements of Philosophy
  21. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy; Principles of Philosophy; The Passions of the Soul
  22. Corneille – Tragedies
  23. John Milton – Works
  24. Molière – Comedies
  25. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensées; Scientific Treatises
  26. John Bunyan - The Pilgrim's Progress
  27. Boyle – The Sceptical Chymist
  28. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light
  29. Benedict de Spinoza – Political Treatises; Ethics
  30. John Locke – A Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Some Thoughts Concerning Education
  31. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies
  32. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Opticks
  33. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays on Human Understanding; Monadology
  34. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe; Moll Flanders
  35. Jonathan Swift – The Battle of the Books; A Tale of a Tub; A Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
  36. William Congreve – The Way of the World
  37. George Berkeley – A New Theory of Vision; A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
  38. Alexander Pope – An Essay on Criticism; The Rape of the Lock; An Essay on Man
  39. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; The Spirit of the Laws
  40. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
  41. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
  42. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; Lives of the Poets
  43. David Hume – A Treatise of Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; History of England
  44. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Discourse on Inequality; On Political Economy; '; The Social Contract; Confessions
  45. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
  46. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
  47. William Blackstone – Commentaries on the Laws of England
  48. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; '
  49. Edward Gibbon – The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
  50. James Boswell – Journal; The Life of Samuel Johnson
  51. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie
  52. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers
  53. Jeremy Bentham – Comment on the Commentaries; Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
  54. Johann Wolfgang Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth
  55. Thomas Robert Malthus – An Essay on the Principle of Population
  56. John Dalton – A New System of Chemical Philosophy
  57. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat
  58. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – The Phenomenology of Spirit; Science of Logic; Elements of the Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
  59. William Wordsworth – Poems
  60. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems ; Biographia Literaria
  61. David Ricardo – On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
  62. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma
  63. Carl von Clausewitz – On War
  64. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
  65. François Guizot – History of Civilization in France
  66. Lord Byron – Don Juan
  67. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism
  68. Michael Faraday – The Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
  69. Nikolai Lobachevsky – Geometrical Researches on the Theory of Parallels
  70. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology
  71. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy
  72. Honoré Balzac – Works
  73. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal
  74. Victor Hugo - Les Misérables
  75. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter
  76. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America
  77. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; Principles of Political Economy; On Liberty; Considerations on Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
  78. Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
  79. William Makepeace Thackeray – Works
  80. Charles Dickens – Works
  81. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
  82. George Boole – The Laws of Thought
  83. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden
  84. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – Das Kapital ; The Communist Manifesto
  85. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch
  86. Herman Melville – Typee; Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
  87. Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
  88. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories
  89. Henry Thomas Buckle – A History of Civilization in England
  90. Francis Galton – Inquiries into Human Faculties and Its Development
  91. Bernhard Riemann – The Hypotheses of Geometry
  92. Henrik Ibsen – Plays
  93. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; "What Is Art?"; Twenty-Three Tales
  94. Richard Dedekind – Theory of Numbers
  95. Wilhelm Wundt – Physiological Psychology; Outline of Psychology
  96. Mark Twain – The Innocents Abroad; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; The Mysterious Stranger
  97. Henry Adams – History of the United States; Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres; The Education of Henry Adams; Degradation of Democratic Dogma
  98. Charles Peirce – Chance, Love, and Logic; Collected Papers
  99. William Sumner – Folkways
  100. Oliver Wendell Holmes – The Common Law; Collected Legal Papers
  101. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; A Pluralistic Universe; Essays in Radical Empiricism
  102. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors
  103. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morality; The Will to Power; Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist
  104. Georg Cantor – Transfinite Numbers
  105. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method; The Foundations of Science
  106. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; Introduction to Psychoanalysis; Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; The Ego and the Id; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
  107. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces
  108. Max Planck – Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
  109. Henri Bergson – Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
  110. John Dewey – How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; The Quest for Certainty; Logic – The Theory of Inquiry
  111. Alfred North Whitehead – A Treatise on Universal Algebra; An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; Process and Reality; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
  112. George Santayana – The Life of Reason; Scepticism and Animal Faith; The Realms of Being ; Persons and Places
  113. Vladimir Lenin – Imperialism; The State and Revolution
  114. Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time
  115. Bertrand Russell – Principles of Mathematics; The Problems of Philosophy; Principia Mathematica; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits
  116. Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
  117. Albert Einstein – The Theory of Relativity; Sidelights on Relativity; The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
  118. James Joyce – "The Dead" in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
  119. Jacques Maritain – Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; Freedom and the Modern World; A Preface to Metaphysics; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism
  120. Franz Kafka – The Trial; The Castle
  121. Arnold J. Toynbee – A Study of History; Civilization on Trial
  122. Jean-Paul Sartre – Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
  123. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – The First Circle; Cancer Ward
The original edition of How to Read a Book contained a separate "contemporary list" because "Here one's judgment must be tentative". All but the following authors were incorporated into the single list of the revised edition:
  1. Ivan Pavlov – Conditioned Reflexes
  2. Thorstein Veblen – The Theory of the Leisure Class; The Higher Learning in America; The Place of Science in Modern Civilization; Vested Interests and the State of Industrial Arts; Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times
  3. Franz Boas – The Mind of Primitive Man; Anthropology and Modern Life
  4. Leon Trotsky – The History of the Russian Revolution

    Television

In 1954 Mortimer Adler hosted a live weekly television series in San Francisco, comprising 52 half-hour programs, entitled The Great Ideas. These programs were produced by the Institute for Philosophical Research and were carried as a public service by the American Broadcasting Company, presented by National Educational Television, the precursor to what is now PBS. Adler bequeathed these films to the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas, where they are available for purchase.
In 1993 and 1994, The Learning Channel created a series of one-hour programs discussing many of the Great Books of history and their impact on the world. It was narrated by Donald Sutherland and Morgan Freeman, among others.