St. John's College
Great Books Program

St. John's College believes that the way to a liberal education lies through a direct and sustained confrontation with the books in which the greatest minds of our civilization have expressed themselves, and through rigorous exercise in translation, mathematical demonstration, music analysis, and laboratory science. To that end, the College offers a four-year, nonelective program in which students read, discuss, and write about the seminal works that have shaped the world in which we live.
Go to St. John's College Great Books Program page.

Freshman Year: Greek Period
Sophmore Year: Roman, Medieval & Renaissance Periods
Junior Year: 17th & 18th Century
Senior Year: 19th & 20th Century




Freshman Year:   Greek Period

HOMER: Iliad, Odyssey

AESCHYLUS: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides, Prometheus Bound

SOPHOCLES: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Philoctetes

THUCYDIDES: Peloponnesian War

EURIPIDES: Hippolytus, Bacchae

HERODOTUS: Histories

ARISTOPHANES: Clouds

PLATO: Meno, Gorgias, Republic, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium, Parmenides, Theatetus, 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

Sophmore Year:   Roman, Medieval, Renaissance Periods

THE BIBLE

ARISTOTLE: De Anima, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Categories

APOLLONIUS: Conics

VIRGIL: Aeneid

PLUTARCH: "Caeser", "Cato the Younger"

EPICTETUS: Discourses, Manual

TACITUS: Annals

PTOLEMY: Almagest

PLOTINUS: The Enneads

AUGUSTINE: Confessions

ST. ANSELM: Proslogium

AQUINAS: Summa Theologica, Summa Contra Gentiles

DANTE: Divine Comedy

CHAUCER: Canterbury Tales

DES PREZ: Mass

MACHIAVELLI: The Prince, Discourses

COPERNICUS: On the Revolutions of the Spheres

LUTHER: The Freedom of a Christian

RABELAIS: Gargantua and Pantagruel

PALESTRINA: Missa Papae Marcelli

MONTAIGNE: Essays

VIETE: "Introduction to the Analytical Art"

BACON: Novum Organum

SHAKESPEARE: Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, The Tempest, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Coriolanus, 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: Sonatas

SCHUBERT: Songs

STRAVINSKY: Symphony of Psalms

Junior Year:   17th & 18th Centuries

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: The 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

ESSAYS by: Young, Maxwell, Taylor, Euler, D. Bernoulli

Senior Year:   19th & 20th Centuries

ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES

SUPREME COURT OPINIONS

HAMILTON, JAY, AND MADISON: The Federalist

DARWIN: Origin of Species

HEGEL: Phenomenology of Mind, "Logic" (from the Encyclopedia)

LOBACHEVSKY: Theory of Parallels

TOCQUEVILLE: Democracy in America

LINCOLN: 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

TWAIN: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

O'CONNOR: Selected Stories

WILLIAM JAMES: Psychology, Briefer Course

NIETZSCHE: Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil

FREUD: General Introduction to Psychoanalysis

VALERY: Poems

WASHINGTON, BOOKER T.: Selected Writings

DUBOIS: The Souls of Black Folk

HEIDEGGER: What is Philosophy?

HEISENBERG: The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory

EINSTEIN: Selected Papers

MILLIKAN: The Electron

CONRAD: Heart of Darkness

FAULKNER: The Bear

POEMS by: Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Baudelaire, Rimbaud

ESSAYS by: Faraday, J.J. Thomson, Mendel, Minkowski, Rutherford, Davisson, Schrodinger, Bohr, Maxwell, de Broigle, Dreisch, Orsted, Ampere, Boveri, Sutton, Morgan, Beadle & Tatum, Sussman, Watson & Crick, Jacob & Monod, Hardy