Academic Program
The Reading List
The reading list that serves as the core of the St. John's College curriculum had its beginnings at Columbia College, at the University of Chicago, and at the University of Virginia. Since 1937, the list of books has been under continued review at St. John's College. The distribution of the books over the four years is significant. Something over 2,000 years of intellectual history form the background of the first two years; about 300 years of history form the background for almost twice as many authors in the last two years.
The first year is devoted to Greek authors and their pioneering understanding of the liberal arts; the second year contains books from the Roman, medieval, and Renaissance periods; the third year has books of the 17th and 18th centuries, most of which were written in modern languages; the fourth year brings the reading into the 19th and 20th centuries.
The chronological order in which the books are read is primarily a matter of convenience and intelligibility; it does not imply a historical approach to the subject matter. The St. John's curriculum seeks to convey to students an understanding of the fundamental problems that human beings have to face today and at all times. It invites them to reflect both on their continuities and their discontinuities.
- HOMER: Iliad, Odyssey
- AESCHYLUS: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides, Prometheus Bound
- SOPHOCLES: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Philoctetes, Ajax
- THUCYDIDES: Peloponnesian War
- EURIPIDES: Hippolytus, Bacchae
- HERODOTUS: Histories
- ARISTOPHANES: Clouds
- PLATO: Meno, Gorgias, Republic, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium, Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Timaeus, Phaedrus
- ARISTOTLE: Poetics, Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, On Generation and Corruption, Politics, Parts of Animals, Generation of Animals
- EUCLID: Elements
- LUCRETIUS: On the Nature of Things
- PLUTARCH: Lycurgus, Solon
- NICOMACHUS: Arithmetic
- LAVOISIER: Elements of Chemistry
- HARVEY: Motion of the Heart and Blood
- Essays by: Archimedes, Fahrenheit, Avogadro, Dalton, Cannizzaro, Virchow, Mariotte, Driesch, Gay-Lussac, Spemann, Stears, J.J. Thompson, Mendeleyev, Berthollet, J.L. Proust
- HEBREW BIBLE
- THE BIBLE: New Testament
- ARISTOTLE: De Anima, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Categories
- APOLLONIUS: Conics
- VIRGIL: Aeneid
- PLUTARCH: "Caesar," "Cato the Younger," "Antony," "Brutus"
- EPICTETUS: Discourses, Manual
- TACITUS: Annals
- PTOLEMY: Almagest
- PLOTINUS: The Enneads
- AUGUSTINE: Confessions
- MAIMONIDES: Guide for the Perplexed
- ST. ANSELM: Proslogium
- AQUINAS: Summa Theologica
- DANTE: Divine Comedy
- CHAUCER: Canterbury Tales
- MACHIAVELLI: The Prince, Discourses
- KEPLER: Epitome IV
- RABELAIS: Gargantua and Pantagruel
- PALESTRINA: Missa Papae Marcelli
- MONTAIGNE: Essays
- VIETE: Introduction to the Analytical Art
- BACON: Novum Organum
- SHAKESPEARE: Richard II, Henry IV, The Tempest, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and Sonnets
- POEMS BY: Marvell, Donne, and other 16th- and 17th-century poets
- DESCARTES: Geometry, Discourse on Method
- PASCAL: Generation of Conic Sections
- BACH: St. Matthew Passion, Inventions
- HAYDN: Quartets
- MOZART: Operas
- BEETHOVEN: Third Symphony
- SCHUBERT: Songs
- MONTEVERDI: L'Orfeo
- STRAVINSKY: Symphony of Psalms
- CERVANTES: Don Quixote
- GALILEO: Two New Sciences
- HOBBES: Leviathan
- DESCARTES: Meditations, Rules for the Direction of the Mind
- MILTON: Paradise Lost
- LA ROCHEFOUCAULD: Maximes
- LA FONTAINE: Fables
- PASCAL: Pensees
- HUYGENS: Treatise on Light, On the Movement of Bodies by Impact
- ELIOT: Middlemarch
- SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise
- LOCKE: Second Treatise of Government
- RACINE: Phaedre
- NEWTON: Principia Mathematica
- KEPLER: Epitome IV
- LEIBNIZ: Monadology, Discourse on Metaphysics, Essay On Dynamics, Philosophical Essays, Principles of Nature and Grace
- SWIFT: Gulliver's Travels
- HUME: Treatise of Human Nature
- ROUSSEAU: Social Contract, The Origin of Inequality
- MOLIERE: Le Misanthrope
- ADAM SMITH: Wealth of Nations
- KANT: Critique of Pure Reason, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
- MOZART: Don Giovanni
- JANE AUSTEN: Pride and Prejudice
- DEDEKIND: "Essay on the Theory of Numbers"
- "Articles of Confederation," "Declaration of Independence," "Constitution of the United States of America"
- HAMILTON, JAY AND MADISON: The Federalist
- TWAIN: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- WORDSWORTH: The Two Part Prelude of 1799
- Essays by: Young, Taylor, Euler, D. Bernoulli, Orsted, Ampere, Faraday, Maxwell
- Supreme Court opinions
- GOETHE: Faust
- DARWIN: Origin of Species
- HEGEL: Phenomenology of Mind, "Logic" (from the Encyclopedia)
- LOBACHEVSKY: Theory of Parallels
- TOCQUEVILLE: Democracy in America
- LINCOLN: Selected Speeches
- FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Selected Speeches
- KIERKEGAARD: Philosophical Fragments, Fear and Trembling
- WAGNER: Tristan and Isolde
- MARX: Capital, Political and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology
- DOSTOEVSKI: Brothers Karamazov
- TOLSTOY: War and Peace
- MELVILLE: Benito Cereno
- O'CONNOR: Selected Stories
- WILLIAM JAMES; Psychology, Briefer Course
- NIETZSCHE: Beyond Good and Evil
- FREUD: Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
- BOOKER T. WASHINGTON: Selected Writings
- DUBOIS: The Souls of Black Folk
- HUSSERL: Crisis of the European Sciences
- HEIDEGGER: Basic Writings
- EINSTEIN: Selected papers
- CONRAD: Heart of Darkness
- FAULKNER: Go Down Moses
- FLAUBERT: Un Coeur Simple
- WOOLF: Mrs. Dalloway
- Poems by: Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Valery, Rimbaud
- Essays by: Faraday, J.J. Thomson, Millikan, Minkowski, Rutherford, Davisson, Schrodinger, Bohr, Maxwell, de Broglie, Heisenberg, Mendel, Boveri, Sutton, Morgan, Beadle & Tatum, Sussman, Watson & Crick, Jacob & Monod, Hardy
For seminar reading assignments, click here.