Certainly! Here's a curated list of the Great Books
curriculum as taught at institutions like St. John’s College
(Annapolis & Santa Fe), which is one of the most famous Great Books
programs in the world.
They don’t use textbooks — instead, students read and
discuss primary texts spanning philosophy, literature, math, science,
and politics from ancient to modern times. Ulysses is often
included in the final years.
📚 The Great Books List
(Core Selections)
📜 Ancient Greek &
Roman Classics
- The
Iliad – Homer
- The
Odyssey – Homer
- Histories
– Herodotus
- Oresteia
– Aeschylus
- Oedipus
the King – Sophocles
- The
Bacchae – Euripides
- The
Republic – Plato
- Symposium
– Plato
- Nicomachean
Ethics – Aristotle
- Metaphysics
– Aristotle
- Poetics
– Aristotle
- On
the Nature of Things – Lucretius
- Meditations
– Marcus Aurelius
- The
Aeneid – Virgil
📖 The Bible (Literary
& Philosophical Readings)
- Genesis,
Exodus
- Psalms
- Ecclesiastes
- Job
- Matthew,
John
- Romans,
Corinthians, Revelation
🏰 Medieval &
Renaissance
- Confessions
– Augustine
- City
of God – Augustine
- The
Consolation of Philosophy – Boethius
- Summa
Theologica (Selections) – Thomas Aquinas
- The
Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri
- The
Prince – Machiavelli
- Essays
– Michel de Montaigne
- Don
Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
- Essays
– Francis Bacon
- Hamlet,
King Lear, The Tempest – William Shakespeare
🧠 Early Modern
Philosophy, Science, and Politics
- Discourse
on Method – René Descartes
- Leviathan
– Thomas Hobbes
- Ethics
– Baruch Spinoza
- Second
Treatise of Government – John Locke
- The
New Science – Giambattista Vico
- Emile
and The Social Contract – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- The
Federalist Papers – Hamilton, Madison, Jay
- Critique
of Pure Reason (selections) – Immanuel Kant
🌍 19th Century Classics
- Phenomenology
of Spirit (selections) – Hegel
- Democracy
in America – Alexis de Tocqueville
- The
Communist Manifesto – Marx & Engels
- On
Liberty – John Stuart Mill
- Thus
Spoke Zarathustra – Friedrich Nietzsche
- War
and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
- Crime
and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Moby-Dick
– Herman Melville
- The
Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
- The
Brothers Karamazov – Dostoevsky
🌊 20th Century
- The
Interpretation of Dreams – Sigmund Freud
- Being
and Time (selections) – Martin Heidegger
- The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions – Thomas Kuhn
- Ulysses
– James Joyce
- The
Waste Land – T.S. Eliot
- The
Second Sex – Simone de Beauvoir
- The
Death of Ivan Ilyich – Tolstoy (again)
- The
Trial – Franz Kafka
- The
Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
🧮 Mathematics &
Science (Core Texts)
Yes — in the Great Books model, math and science are read as
literature and thought.
- Elements
– Euclid
- On
the Heavens – Aristotle
- Principia
Mathematica – Newton
- Dialogues
Concerning Two New Sciences – Galileo
- Introduction
to Arithmetic – Nicomachus
- Opticks
– Isaac Newton
- Treatise
on Electricity and Magnetism – James Clerk Maxwell
- Relativity
– Albert Einstein
🔁 Integrated Structure
The books are not read chronologically. They are:
- Spiral-structured
— ideas revisited over 4 years
- Taught
via seminar discussions, tutorials, and lab-style inquiry
- Designed
to create cross-century conversations between thinkers
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