the St. Johns College Reading List, freshman year

I cannot endorse the St. John's College approach (all college students, for all 4 years, in the same curriculum, largely based around reading of >100 year old works). But it is interesting enough (and for some students, effective enough) that I also have no interest in arguing against it.

I am also not sure if the work selection is better or worse than similar lists, such as the 1952 Great Books of the Western World series.

But, as a reference, here is the first-year curriculum.

https://www.sjc.edu/application/files/4115/4810/0934/St_Johns_College_Great_Books_Reading_List.pdf

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”

Ptolemy: Almagest

Pascal: Treatise on the Equilibrium of Liquids

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. Thomson, Mendeleyev, Berthollet, J.L. Proust