[HN Gopher] St. John's Reading List: A Great Books Curriculum
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St. John's Reading List: A Great Books Curriculum
Author : Tomte
Score : 85 points
Date : 2023-02-02 17:38 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sjc.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sjc.edu)
| [deleted]
| Animats wrote:
| It's an interesting approach. They do like the classic sources.
| I've at least skimmed more than half of those titles, long after
| college. It's amusing that they have students read Pikkety's
| "Capital" before Marx's "Capital".
|
| You don't want to learn geometry from Euclid. You read Euclid
| after you already know geometry, to see how he built it up.
| Similarly, you don't want to learn calculus from Newton. Or
| physics from Aristotle. What you're seeing there is people trying
| to figure something out before the tools for the job were
| developed.
|
| There are great papers in engineering, where a theoretical
| advance changed the world. They're not well known. These should
| be as well known as the "Great Books".
|
| * Maxwell's paper "On Governors". In a few pages, he invents
| feedback control theory. People were building steam engine
| governors but didn't understand stability and lag. It's a
| milestone in that it's one of the first times abstract math met
| practical engineering and the result worked.
|
| * Shannon's discovery that telephone toll switches could be
| reduced from needing O(N^2) relays to O(N log N) was one.
| Suddenly, combinatorics went from a useless abstraction to a huge
| financial win for AT&T.
|
| * "Rational Psychrometric Formulae", by Willis Carrier. Least
| click-bait title ever. Basis of air conditioning. It's how you
| make an air conditioner and control both temperature and humidity
| at the cold end, rather than getting cold, humid air out.
|
| * Von Neumann's Report on the EDVAC. That's better known. It's
| how to make a CPU. He got all the basic architecture right,
| except for index registers.
| thwayunion wrote:
| Those are excellent suggestions. I think we are probably at the
| point where you could do a Great Books curriculum in Computer
| Science. Would be interesting to put together that list: 10-20
| foundational primary texts in Algorithms, Programming/Software
| Engineering, Logic, AI, and Computer Architecture.
|
| But, as you note, it'd probably be a terrible way to _actually
| learn_ how to engineer software. More intellectually
| satisfying, though :)
|
| _> It 's amusing that they have students read Pikkety's
| "Capital" before Marx's "Capital"._
|
| I get why it's amusing, but it also makes sense. Marx's
| "Capital" is kind of a beast. Pikkety's is written more-or-less
| toward a modern general audience. If I were sequencing these
| books in a student's intellectual development, Pikkety
| definitely comes before Marx.
| transfire wrote:
| Highly recommend this school.
| sys32768 wrote:
| Tried to get my oldest to go here. She reads super fast with
| high comprehension and loves to debate, but she's so terrified
| of going into debt that she's now in a state college taking
| computer science and saying Chat GPT is way more helpful than
| her professor for understanding or fixing code.
| jdmoreira wrote:
| Smart kid. I would even skip the whole state college thing as
| soon as she can be dangerous enough to get a job.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| If it's cheap enough, the paper's worth it just to never
| worry about having to explain your lacking a degree. Even
| if you rarely actually have to, it's always in the back of
| your mind. A potential question that you'll need to be
| ready to reframe positively, plus that constant worry that
| you're receiving extra scrutiny, just... go away
| completely.
|
| It'll also be very handy if one ever wishes to leave the US
| --most countries one might want to live and work in will be
| much more likely to let you in with a degree, and
| especially a CS degree.
|
| I went back and finished mine. Removing that stressor from
| interviews was worth it, even if that was basically the
| only benefit, which it was--nearly all the benefits I can
| point to from college came from the humanities degree I
| nearly finished, years before completing the CS degree. For
| the CS degree, perhaps two or three hours worth of
| instruction or material have proven either useful or
| edifying since. But, I'm glad to have the paper.
| codybontecou wrote:
| Huh, this is neat. If you click on a book's subject(s), it will
| then take you to the specific topic and a reading list tailored
| to it.
|
| For example, this is their Mathematics reading list:
| https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/subjects....
| tgv wrote:
| Except that list is ... eclectic, to put it politely. If you
| want to learn maths, I wouldn't recommend Aristotle, Descartes
| and Darwin.
|
| Perhaps I don't understand what "The information presented is
| for illustration purposes only and may not reflect the current
| reading list" means, and why one would link that page anyway.
| thwayunion wrote:
| Aristotle is reasonable because (1) logic and (2) it's going
| to be a core part of any Great Books curriculum so it's part
| of the core as opposed to specifically "mathematics". But if
| you're going to read Aristotle and Russell with the
| justification "logic", you _must_ include Goedel and Hilbert.
|
| Agree on Descartes and Darwin, but they're both sort of
| canonical in Great Books reading lists. Honestly not sure why
| Descartes is considered so important to the history of ideas,
| particularly in Mathematics where there are so many other
| very worthy minds and texts to study, but _shrugs_.
| ticviking wrote:
| The Great Books approach involves reading the actual
| historical development of a subject and seeing not only what
| the state of the art is but how we got from here to there.
| spekcular wrote:
| I believe the person you're replying to understands that.
| The claim is that this approach is really bad way to learn
| math.
|
| As someone who has learned and taught a lot of math, I
| agree with that claim.
| viscanti wrote:
| It appears to be a liberal arts program. Is this
| substantially different, with respect to the rigor of
| mathematics, than most other comparable programs? They
| might cover more calculus (maybe at a theoretical level?)
| than most liberal arts programs.
| spekcular wrote:
| Yes, it is substantially different with respect to
| content than standard undergraduate mathematics programs.
| It covers a few historically important texts and does not
| teach (if those texts are any indication) most of what is
| usually taught in an undergraduate math degree. (A poster
| above writes: "Freshman math was almost entirely the
| study of Euclid and Nicomachus.")
| uxp100 wrote:
| So this is the books used in an undergraduate liberal
| arts degree (your degree is IN liberal arts). These are
| the math tagged books in a quirky bachelors in philosophy
| degree, essentially. They do not have a math degree (or
| any degrees aside from bachelors in liberal arts?).
| spekcular wrote:
| I see - I understood "liberal arts program" above to mean
| a liberal arts college in general (typically offering a
| mathematics major). I agree that this reading list is
| better suited for something like "history of math for
| humanities students."
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I'd expect the rigor is fine, but the particulars that
| are learned differ.
|
| I doubt the distinction matters at all for the vast
| majority of grads, especially ones who don't intend to
| become mathematicians. Learning _how to math_ is probably
| more important than the specific material, outside a
| handful of things. You can pick up the rest as-needed,
| and for the vast majority of people, "the rest" that is
| in fact _ever_ needed for the entire rest of their lives,
| will be very little. Especially if they 're pursuing a
| classics-based liberal arts degree.
|
| I doubt many of their grads are planning to become actual
| computer-scientists or mathematicians or mech. engineers
| or any of that. Lawyer, maybe doctor, maybe writer, maybe
| an ordinary computer programmer, that sort of thing. As
| long as you're not _afraid_ of math, you 'll be fine in
| any of those not having had a typical PDE class or
| whatever.
| korse wrote:
| Perhaps it is a bad way to learn 'applied math'? Bertrand
| Russel might disagree...
| macrolocal wrote:
| But consider that they include Hardy's "Mendelian
| Proportions in a Mixed Population" but not Riemann's "On
| the Hypotheses Which Lie at the Foundations of Geometry."
| a_techwriter_00 wrote:
| St. John's graduate here. It looks like that list includes a
| lot of what we read in "lab" class mixed in with what we read
| in math class. Freshman math was almost entirely the study of
| Euclid and Nicomachus.
| voisin wrote:
| Can you give your thoughts on the approach at St. John's
| and whether you would recommend it?
| thebooktocome wrote:
| It has been trendy in the last fifty or so years to strip
| historical and cultural content from math classes in favor of
| rote computation (as the former is easiest to test in a
| "standardized" setting), but I'd argue that dehumanizing
| mathematics makes it far harder to understand, or indeed even
| care about.
|
| Word problems are the last edifice of natural philosophy in
| the high school mathematics curriculum and there's constant
| pressure to remove those as well.
| aik wrote:
| Agreed. The book "A Mathematician's Lament" I found
| enlightening on this topic.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| This coupled with a weird fixation on achieving a
| sufficiently "high" level of mathematics, typically without
| a strong justification for any non-grad-school-bound
| students. Reeks of gate-keeping. I've known multiple people
| who've failed to finish a degree solely because of math
| classes covering material that they'd almost certainly
| never have seen again their entire lives, even if they
| achieved a middling-successful career in their desired
| field.
|
| If "thinking mathematically" is the actual, vital part of
| that education, for most students, I have some doubts that
| a classics-based approach is any worse than the modern
| kind. Maybe better, except for a small slice of students
| who will continue to engage with advanced mathematics after
| they finish undergrad and _do_ need the modern version.
| skottk wrote:
| We actually read some Descartes in math-- some of the papers
| from which we get the term "Cartesian coordinates." What he
| does in those papers fascinating, but has very little to do
| with the way that we learn and use Cartesian coordinates.
| thwayunion wrote:
| I went through a great books curriculum (not in math), and...
| what a strange list. It reminds me of my primary complaint with
| the whole Great Books approach: it's mired in fairly a
| ridiculous fetishism of the Greek classics, the Enlightenment
| era, the American founding, and the Anglo view of the western
| world. This works... well enough... in Philosophy and History
| and the like. But it a much larger problem in Mathematics where
| the field is essentially unrecognizable from the way it
| would've been taught in 1920 or whatever.
|
| I really like the general ethos approach, but the cultural
| baggage grates and for Mathematics in particular leads to odd
| selections and a sort of out-of-touch-Oxbridge-retiree-who-was-
| already-a-touch-senile-in-1982 understanding of the history of
| ideas, tbh.
|
| The Grundlagenkrise is hardly covered at all, despite having so
| many wonderful candidates for short illustrative texts that fit
| the Great Books tradition perfectly (none of which were
| authored by Russell, although a preference for Russell over
| Goedel is hardly surprising given my first paragraph). And the
| emphasis on Physics and Natural Philosophy over the development
| of the science of computing is a shocking oversight given the
| sheer accessibility of Turing's work. I'm honestly not sure
| what eg Darwin is doing in this list (despite being a good
| candidate any great books curriculum).
|
| Also, significantly more coverage of the development of
| arithemtic in the Arab world and simultaneous developments of
| various things in both the Indian subcontinent and in the far
| east. The Greek fetishism strikes hard in that first year; no
| one born after 1850 needs that much Euclid.
|
| Where is the development of probability theory? Texts from
| Riemann, Boole, Laplace, Fermat, Galois, and especially Euler
| seem more important than Bacon or certainly Franklin.
|
| Etc.
| Sevii wrote:
| Had a great experience at St. John's. Unfortunately, transferred
| to a state engineering school due to financial reasons.
| aug_aug wrote:
| I look at this list, especially the "Freshman" list, and feel
| like public school really let me down, lol.
| amykhar wrote:
| I love this. Of course I'm reminded of Good Will Hunting and want
| to break out my library card and get this expensive education on
| a budget.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I have read many of these works listed. I don't like this
| database-looking list format; too many books there. Some of them
| are quite challenging.
|
| Freshman Reading: Homer - Illyad, Odyssey ... ok! if you read the
| Odyssey in your own native language (not greek), you probably
| will enjoy it, but how are you going to know about the grand
| themes unless someone tells you about it?
|
| seems sad in a way that these great works are reduced to a list
| item
| rebolyte wrote:
| > how are you going to know about the grand themes unless
| someone tells you about it?
|
| SJC grad here. The Program encourages you to encounter the
| works for yourself and see what _you_ think the themes/ideas
| are.
|
| You're lightly discouraged from reading the translator's
| preface, since they share their own opinions. Different
| students bring different translations of the material, and
| additionally the language class that lasts all 4 years of
| undergrad is basically asking what translation is, is it
| possible.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| very interesting - thanks for posting that additional angle
| daseiner1 wrote:
| For most works I've read, classical or otherwise, I'm baffled
| that the preface isn't a postscript.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > how are you going to know about the grand themes unless
| someone tells you about it?
|
| For that matter, St. John's students self-select to be the kind
| of students who would appreciate being guided to discover the
| major themes. Most other students need to be told them and then
| think themes are pretentious puffery because they lack the life
| experience to recognize or appreciate them.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Freshman Reading: Homer - Illyad, Odyssey ... ok! if you read
| the Odyssey in your own native language (not greek), you
| probably will enjoy it, but how are you going to know about the
| grand themes unless someone tells you about it?
|
| Isn't there a class instruction, supplementary reading, and
| discussion component for these books? I assume so.
|
| But I think a lot of people -- even freshmen! -- could just
| read these books and get something from them anyway.
| skottk wrote:
| Talking about them in a small class of people who read the
| same thing at the same time, led by 1 or 2 professors who are
| practiced in _not_ acting like more than advanced students,
| is _really_ different from just reading the book.
|
| I'd read _Pride and Prejudice_ many times before the seminar
| on it, and I could not have predicted what other people saw
| in the book and wanted to talk about with a pile of postit
| notes, a ball of red yarn, and ten hours in front of a big
| wall.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Is it better to have read them and missed the themes or not to
| have read them at all?
|
| Background: read both Iliad and odyssey in children's section
| of library in the 5th grade. Also read most of one of them in
| an honors philosophy class in college. Can't remember which.
| Recalled the scene where they were throwing Trojans off the
| walls after defeating the city when I made a hard tackle in
| rugby, driving my enemy into the ground.
| uncletaco wrote:
| I stayed at St. John's one summer and I remember they had a
| "final" where they had to solve geometric problems by actually
| drawing the proofs on a chalk board, shapes and all. I watched
| that girl go through the whole process while studying and I was
| fascinated.
| skottk wrote:
| That's what you do literally every day in math - take turns
| going to the board and working through proofs. Ptolemy is
| Waterloo for anyone who has trouble drawing big circles.
| wk_end wrote:
| A former partner of mine was a St. John's alum (and champion), so
| I heard a lot about and thought a lot about their undergraduate
| program.
|
| Of course this is a wonderful list of brilliant works. I don't
| know if reading nothing but primary sources is the most efficient
| way to become a critical thinker or knowledgeable (e.g. reading
| Euclid might be a treat for those who know geometry, but is it
| the ideal way to learn geometry?), but it certainly sounds like a
| great way to become cultured and a great way to spend four years,
| given the chance.
|
| My feeling was also that such a heavy emphasis on classical
| (Western!) thought and works does its students a bit of a
| disservice. This is a little dramatic, but I'd say a very serious
| view in the postmodern, post-WWII academy is that the culmination
| of 3000 years of Western culture, in the country that was
| considered by many to be at the height of Western civilization,
| turned out to be the Holocaust, and that so deeply fetishizing
| "the canon" is problematic for that reason and others. Without
| dismissing the greatness of anything on this list, it's
| unfortunate that it's not until the third or fourth years that
| you start to see stuff from outside the European tradition, in
| very limited numbers, often just as electives. There seems to be
| a decent selection of works reckoning with American slavery,
| which is good, but if I recall and AFAICT not much about European
| colonialism, the Holocaust, CIA-backed coups in South America,
| the horrors of Stalinism, rising Asian powers, the postmodern
| condition, any post-sexual revolution gender politics...a robust
| knowledge of the Greeks is all well and good, but I don't know if
| that's enough to be a well-rounded citizen of the world, these
| days.
| skottk wrote:
| The greatest weakness of the school is that the list of works
| was compiled in 1922 and has changed only incrementally since.
| It's also a great _strength_ of the school, but you could enter
| the world in 1988 from SJC knowing absolutely nothing about it.
| I'm sure that that's still true now.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > There seems to be a decent selection of works reckoning with
| American slavery, which is good, but if I recall and AFAICT not
| much about European colonialism, the Holocaust, CIA-backed
| coups in South America, the horrors of Stalinism, rising Asian
| powers, the postmodern condition, any post-sexual revolution
| gender politics...a robust knowledge of the Greeks is all well
| and good, but I don't know if that's enough to be a well-
| rounded citizen of the world, these days.
|
| Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, most college grads (let alone
| non-grads) from traditional programs that weren't poli-sci or
| philosophy would receive a better "citizen of the world"
| education from reading and understanding the first couple books
| of _The Republic_ than they evidently picked up in 17 or more
| damn years of formal schooling.
|
| They could literally exceed all that education in a lazy Sunday
| afternoon, because despite all those years they somehow failed
| to appreciate _what the questions even are_ and that those
| questions aren 't as easy to dismiss as many pop-understandings
| and pop-philosophies suggest, so they end up with these
| embarrassingly-bad ideas about it (and are often _weirdly_
| confident that they know it all!).
|
| They're in exactly the same position as the targets of Socrates
| "what is justice, actually?" question at the very damn
| beginning of the book, thinking they have a simple answer for
| the question and that their answer's more-or-less adequate.
| That's how far all that education got them. No-where, in other
| words.
| drstewart wrote:
| > There seems to be a decent selection of works reckoning with
| American slavery, which is good, but if I recall and AFAICT not
| much about European colonialism, the Holocaust, CIA-backed
| coups in South America, the horrors of Stalinism, rising Asian
| powers, the postmodern condition, any post-sexual revolution
| gender politics
|
| Not much about Japanese horrors in WWII, Chinese imperialism,
| Mongol raids, African-originated slave traders, African tribal
| genocides, machismo anti-homosexual Latino culture either.
|
| Just seems you forgot to mention these for some reason. Maybe
| because the culmination of 3000 years of Asian, Africa, and
| South American history isn't utopia either?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I really disagree with the implication. It's not like Hitler or
| the slavers were well read in their Greek philosophy.
| Traditionally -- and I hope going into the future -- the
| classical works of western civ have been a source of enduring
| liberalism. They show the value and meaning of freedom -- and
| nuanced, complex, non-black/white thought.
|
| But of course I'm biased because I'm deeply immersed in the
| classics--and I draw from it regularly. I find it troubling
| that people feel comfortable portraying classical civ as Nazi
| fodder...
| wk_end wrote:
| Which "slavers" are you referring to? Almost all of the
| American Founding Fathers owned slaves, and they were of
| course very familiar with the tradition of liberal thought.
|
| I can't speak for Hitler's knowledge of the Greeks
| specifically, but he was democratically elected by the nation
| of Germany, which - like I mentioned - was considered to be
| one of the most "civilized" in Europe (and thus the world).
| It's easy enough to draw a line from Hegel or Nietzsche -
| both on this list - to Nazism, after all. It's even easier to
| draw a line from Heidegger to Nazism, and he's also on this
| list.
| thow4533566 wrote:
| Hitler was only sort of democratically elected. He lost the
| direct vote for president by a landslide against
| Hindenburg. Later, his party became the largest in
| parliament though without a majority (37%). He was only
| made chancellor after another election were his party lost
| ground (33%), through a backroom deal.
|
| Hitler's highest formal education was finishing secondary
| school.
| neaden wrote:
| That is just how elections work in a parliamentary system
| though, it's not unusual to have a ruling party without a
| majority of the vote.
| thow4533566 wrote:
| Not disputing that. It's just important to know the
| historical context and not give the wrong impression when
| saying "he was democratically elected". He was, in the
| sense that in representative democracy a vote for a party
| often in fact is a vote for a particular politician. But
| he was not in the sense of a direct, personal democratic
| election.
|
| It's also important to be aware that Hitler, at the point
| he became chancellor, had already served a prison
| sentence for high treason for trying to abolish
| parliamentary republic in the Munich putsch. Those were
| highly unusual and tumultuous times, after all.
| a_techwriter_00 wrote:
| You're right, that view is "a little" dramatic. The Holocaust
| proposition was maybe more defensible 20 years ago when we
| could still look at Third World with rose-colored glasses.
|
| Nowadays, I think if someone argues along the lines of "3,000
| years of Western culture culminated in the Holocaust," they
| should also consider that the same logic leads to "5,000 years
| of Chinese culture culminated in the ongoing genocides in
| Xinjiang and Tibet" or "1,400 years of Muslim culture
| culminated in 9/11" or any number of other such propositions
| that I think most thinking people can see are problematic.
| Those things happen in spite of, not because of, the broader
| cultural/intellectual canons.
| tgv wrote:
| > a very serious view in the postmodern, post-WWII academy is
|
| That's just a load of edgy nonsense to get attention.
| Unfortunately, it seems to have worked.
| daseiner1 wrote:
| Which part, exactly, is """edgy"""?
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Have always been fascinated by this school, had a hankering to do
| to their Graduate program which is a shortened version of their
| undergrad Curriculum.
| skottk wrote:
| Class of '87 here. Most valuable takeaway is that you can read
| almost _anything_ directly or in translation. You don't need to
| read a summary of Hegel, you can read Hegel. You don't need to
| read an article about a Supreme Court case like Marbury v.
| Madison, you can read the case itself.
|
| When you go into technology, you're then willing to dive into the
| guts of the actual docs instead of waiting for a book or blog
| post about it. Another way it prepares you for tech--
| understanding philosophy is the skill of drawing incredibly fine
| distinctions between things. Designing software is also the skill
| of drawing incredibly fine distinctions between things. Having
| years of experience in arguing these incredibly fine distinctions
| was a huge leg up fr me when I was getting started, and remains
| useful to this day.
|
| I think that the careers of my graduating class are primarily in
| software, law, academia, and medicine.
|
| Funny things about it - there are a lot of places where your
| undergrad experience just doesn't overlap with that of people who
| didn't go there. Everyone studies the same thing at SJC, so if I
| meet a Johnny who went there years after me or years before, I
| can tell them what I did for my senior thesis and they'll have a
| similar reaction - why the hell did you do that? It's also
| _extremely_ small, so if they went there during the same years I
| did, I almost certainly know them.
|
| The original-works thing works gangbusters on philosophy,
| science, and literature, and breaks down a little in math. You
| spend a frustrating amount of time doing Ptolemaic astronomy,
| because it's an excellent classical treatment of trigonometry.
| You study Newton for calculus, but you don't actually learn
| anything that the modern world thinks of as calculus from Newton,
| so you study supplemental materials that teach you derivatives
| and integrals over algebraic expressions.
|
| It's culturally pretty liberal on the inside, although it's
| bizarrely worshipped by some right-wingers who didn't go there
| because of the curriculum's focus on works from the European
| tradition.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > Most valuable takeaway is that you can read almost _anything_
| directly or in translation. You don't need to read a summary of
| Hegel, you can read Hegel. You don't need to read an article
| about a Supreme Court case like Marbury v. Madison, you can
| read the case itself.
|
| I think what's under-appreciated is that, a fair amount of the
| time, for these sorts of enduring classics, reading the
| original is both better and _easier_ than reading later takes
| on the same material. If you read the later derivative works
| and go back, often you 'll find they've misinterpreted certain
| parts in strange ways, or left out things that seem important,
| and the original is not-uncommonly also both an easier and more
| entertaining read.
| skottk wrote:
| And that in some cases they assume familiarity with a large
| body of knowledge of _other_ people's commentaries on the
| works, and in fact, those second-hand sources are what
| they're really responding to.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| It seems like this kind of program was popular in Canada at some
| point.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_programs_in_Canada
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(page generated 2023-02-02 23:00 UTC)