how long would it take to actually read all this?
 It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
 UFOs Are A Psyop Shirt $21.68 |
It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
how long would it take to actually read all this?
how long would it take to actually read all this?
It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
UFOs Are A Psyop Shirt $21.68 |
It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
The Great conversations book by Hutchins has a reading list for these books but beware that lots of it is only excerpts. The list is almost entirely chronological except for the Apology which is put at the very beginning as it is considered the best intro to the western canon.
Nonsensical. For what purpose could someone have to read the first 2 parts of brother karamazov and then read bunch of other shit then finally finish the 2 parts a year later? Pseuds love to over complicate and overthink everything
That list was created by Robert Maynard Hutchins, a man much more knowledgeable and accomplished I would bet than you are.
It is split into chunks for people who do not usually read but wish to learn.
10 years
You could easily read all those in less than 10 years
Yes, if you want to just shove a bunch of stuff into your head without retaining anything. You sure could.
could easily do it in under 5 with retainment, I guess not if you're 100 IQ midwit
Hutchins’ reading list is tailor made for everyone. If you are super smart that is fine but most people aren’t going to go through the entire western canon in a year.
I said under 5 not a year. They are the types of books you could spend the rest of your life studying but you could definitly read them within 5 years with an adequate level of retainment.
Okay, knock yourself out. Most people would pace themselves somewhat differently than that.
The 10 yr plan is for the average person to read. I actually came across a great books reading group online once (the entire website was private so you had to join to even get in and I don’t know who you are even supposed to contact since they didn’t list their info). I saw their reading plan and they had an entire month dedicated to the Timaeus-Critias which seemed really excessive since you can read that dialogue in a day.
And I guess you're an unemployed neet
No you couldn't
Oh and also to add, it’s a TEN YEAR reading list.
https://greatconversation.com/ten-year-reading-list/
Is there a reason for the way the works are divided and ordered in this scheme?
It is mostly chronological except for Plato’s apology like I said. Besides that, it is just supposed to be the most basic overview of science, math, lit, poetry, history in the western canon. I have the original book it is from and there isn’t anything more specific about it other than being a general overview of key works.
I meant why, for example, part of a book like Brothers Karamazov is read one year, and the rest of the book is not read until some later year. The plan seems arbitrary, but I thought that there might be a thematic principle of some description.
No, there isn’t some coherent explanation to any of it besides breaking it down in chunks.
Oh this is actually the website I spoke about here
https://greatconversation.com/what-we-are-reading/
See? They dedicated March 2023 to reading the Timaeus dialogue. Most of these readings probably don’t need an entire month.
Are there any more lists like these? I would love to do something like this but do not want to waste my time on filler, something with Eastern lit would be cool too. pic is Adler's
I'd say about 32-36 months.
Dont think about it, just knock em off one at a time
>how long would it take to actually read all this?
It says right there. Four years. Freshman year, sophomore year, junior year, senior year. St John's students legitimately read all these books in 4 years.
Yes but they also likely devote ten hours a day to reading and also they all have trust funds.
>St John's students legitimately read all these books in 4 years.
false
a considerable amount is excerpted; go look up the appendix of the book 'the great canon controversy'
>thinking liberal arts college students actually do work as if modern colleges aren’t all glorified extended high school which is just extended government funded babysitting
schoolyears aren’t even a full year. 2 semesters a year, 15 weeks a semster for 4 years is 120 weeks of assignments. the average student is not reading all those works in 4yrs much less in 2 years.
It’s possible but that would require that person to read like it’s a full time job l, have a very eclectic taste for literary schlock and somehow maintain their initial enthusiasm to see it through till the end. Only the biggest pseuds would attempt to read a list like this then pretend they’re all profound and palatable after giving up after the first 2
They are likely all excerpts. There is no way you are given a choice between reading all of ISOLT and Borges Ficciones like it says in the perceptorial books section.
It depends on what you mean by reading. There are people who devout their entire professional academic lives to reading Plato. For me I could see myself spending 10+ years if I wanted to closely read every single book on this list. The good news is that you don’t have to read everything on this list nor would I recommend you try. A lot of it is pointless like old science books or very particular kinds of 19th and 20th century high society books to impress people who no longer exist. Also basically the list ends at 1920 where you actually do need to read contemporary books to understand our time. There is a completionist mindset among IQfy users who think they need to or even could read absolutely every single important book that’s ever written. It’s way better for you if you focus on being well read in an author or area you care about than try to impress people because you speed read Lavoisier elements of chemistry. Also you can read too much and should try to be balanced in real life with personal development.
>A lot of it is pointless like old science books or very particular kinds of 19th and 20th century high society books to impress people who no longer exist.
This is important stuff for learning how we got here today and also as secondary lit for other important poems and novels. In great conversations, Hutchins in the preface defends reading scientific works because Dante for instance based his cosmology entirely on Euclid and Ptolemy. It is important enough as secondary lit that you should be familiar with the scientific basis of those works.
I am aware of this argument but disagree that it’s worth the investment of your time. I think you should have a good overview of the history of science and obviously you should have a strong background in History generally. You ideally should have a good background in math and contemporary science but obviously thats not always the case. But life is so unbelievably short that I won’t and wouldn’t recommend people go out of their way to read literally centuries old scientific works just as secondary literature to improve their understanding of books that they are reading as a hobby. Of course if you are a PhD student of Dante then read Euclid but for the average person it’s probably not worth the investment. I find issues with the list idea in itself to be honest. I can see that a lot of this is concocted to give the participants a certain romantic idea of themselves as an early 20th century aristocrat. It’s easy to see how this could be an ego trap if you aren’t careful. Also there is in my opinion a big problem that the list basically ends with Heidegger and doesn’t really have any books that address contemporary world. You probably need to read something that discusses postmodernism and contemporary technology to be part of present day conversation even casually on places like IQfy.
>I am aware of this argument but disagree that it’s worth the investment of your time...I won’t and wouldn’t recommend people go out of their way to read literally centuries old scientific works
Came here to agree with this
>I find issues with the list idea in itself to be honest.
And to agree with this, but only in part. I think having *a* list is absolutely important, but if we were to pare it down to the essentials / things still ubiquitously referenced it would be dramatically shorter, and if we rank-order it by importance it would probably look something like
>T0 most of the Bible
>T0.5 Homer, half or so of Shakespeare, some of Plato, some of Aristotle, Dante, Augustine, Sophocles' Oedipus and Antigone, Aeschylus's Agamemnon and Prometheus Bound, Machiavelli's The Prince, Goethe's Faust, (and this will probably seem controversial or incongruous, but, Kafka.)
>Power gap
etc.
The stuff that is forgotten and not referenced is still important for how it got us here. Even if you dont care to read Ptolemy or any of the other writers Dante himself read and even if you think they are a waste of time for others, their inherent importance is still apparent.
I hasten to add that my issue with the idea of *the* list is that it's not a good thing for a list to be so extensive or to include so much that is so niche, because it's likely to inadvertently crowd out a great deal that is not on the list but absolutely worthwhile and at least the equal of much of what is there (where is Sallust, or Caesar, or the Norse sagas?), and also that it is a good thing for the intellectual life of an individual or a group to select and discover things on their own that perhaps nobody else reads anymore. It's good for someone to be able to bring something new (old), something different, some insight from something they've studied on their own. Addison's Cato was very formative to the US Founding Fathers, for example, but who reads it anymore?
Seconded my problem with the list was the way it positions itself. The associations around the project are rooted in a kind of American conservative pseudo Anglo elitism. I am all for recognizing and enjoying higher value culture but this comes across as a bit cargo cult thing. The people who participated in this want to imagine themselves as a kind Oxbridge and Etonian gentleman. While this is probably better than what the actual elites are currently doing I would rather try to be in touch with contemporary reality. If I were to give a recommendation for what people should read it would be to learn what’s valuable by reading some of the classics then letting their interests guide them.You shouldn’t read to impress people or for your personal ego. Also the average person on this board should be aware of the danger of using books as an escape mechanism. You absolutely must work on establishing your self in the real world over reading ancient philosophical text.
It doesn't count if not done in the orignal languages
At least 2 years for me.
Note that this is a reading list solely to get started as a worthwhile man. If you are not roughly familiar with the list—that is, if you haven't read at least half of these books and heard enough about the others to roughly understand what they're about—by the time you apply to college, it's over for you. Go pump gas or die in Syria or Ukraine, either side.
My list would cut out all religious, scientific, and political texts
>Homer
>Plato
>Greek Tragedians
>Aristotle
>Chaucer
>Dante
>Montaigne
>Shakespeare
>Cervantes
>Moliere and Racine
>Milton
>Goethe
>Emerson and Whitman
>Chekhov and Ibsen
>Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky
>Nietzsche
>Freud
>Proust
>Joyce
>Hemingway and Faulkner
>Kafka
>Beckett
I might be forgetting a name or two but this I feel is a solid list that will take one through the evolution of literature in the western world. If women are needed than throw on Woolf, Austen, the Brontës, and Dickinson
I forgot:
>Virgil
>Ovid
>Rabelais
>Boccaccio
>Poe
>Baudelaire and Rimbaud
>Flaubert
>Henry James
>Borges
>My list would cut out all religious
You're being silly. A sizeable cross-section of the list becomes absurd and rootless without some understanding of the Bible
>Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe
chief among them, but obviously not exclusive (what to make of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! if you don't know who Absalom was?)
I know who Absalom was and I never read the Bible
Yeah hes the guy who stuck the metal poker up Nicholas' ass.
How nice for you
The point is that Biblical references are so ubiquitous that in order to have an understanding of those authors' works worth being called 'understanding', you need a familiarity with the Bible's stories
Obviously not all of the Bible is necessary, but as I said above, most of it is the literary bedrock of Western literature as a matter of course
Your feelings about any religions that use it as a holy text are totally beside the point
See
for my thoughts on it. I guess I’ll add the Bible and also a little reluctantly add Karl Marx, the emblem of class conscious literature
I'm surprised that you're fine with completely omitting any supplementary reading on the historical background for each major set of works but are ticked off by the absence of the Bible.
Do you think it's possible to read Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace without knowing who Napoleon was and what the outcome of his invasion of Russia was?
Do you believe that Dante's Divine Comedy makes much sense without knowing about the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict that took place during the poet's lifetime?
Can you understand Cervantes' Don Quixote without knowing about the state of Spain once the Reconquista was all done with?
Can you make sense of great parts of Joyce's Ulysses while ignoring the domination of Ireland by English people since the Middle Ages and the then-ongoing Irish home rule movement?
Christianity is an important part of Western culture, as is the Bible, but it's not the key to the Western world.
At a certain point students at a higher level have to be expected to do some background research of their own. If there is supplementary material for every book I listed, the list would be monstrous and defeat the purpose of why I made the list- a general overview of the evolution of western literature. I wanted to keep it as trim as possible and not bloated. I feel I could even remove a few of those names. I wouldn’t be against the KJV bible, per se, I just wouldn’t want it taught religiously. My course work wouldn’t be religious. An atheistic literary analysis is something I wouldn’t have a problem with
The Bible is considered a massive work by many people. I know for a fact that many devout Christians I've personally met haven't actually read much from the Bible besides what gets read on Sunday at church.
I think reading Genesis, Exodus, the Gospels, and a few other famous stories from the Bible (like the story of king David, the one of Job, or the one of Jonah and the Whale) would probably cover most of the references that people make to the Bible.
For the average person, I don't think it's necessary to read the Bible for the sake of memorizing every single bit from it. Most readers might be fine with just looking up lesser-known names from the Bible rather than preparing for "approaching the Canon" by reading the entire Bible.
I suppose most people are fine with not knowing the names of obscure Seleucid kings or the wives of Egyptian pharaohs, so I don't see why Biblical references should be given any greater importance than any other historical or geographical ones. After all, looking up bits of information is nowadays exceedingly easy thanks to search engines and neatly organized massive databases.
Yeah. I’ll probably make a revised consolidated list shortly with it included. I would just worry about the slippery slope. At what point should books that are referenced a lot be excluded simply because they are referenced? The Bible has characters and stories so it makes sense but what about someone like Plutarch who gives background info on a few figures who are referenced a lot? I love the guy but I didn’t want the list to veer off into history too, hence no Herodotus, Thucydides, etc
>you didn't exhaustively detail all of your possible objections so I'm going to assume they don't exist and chastise you for not listing them
Is Charles Dickens not considered? Not regarded?
Dickens is represented in the original Great Books series which this course is based off of, which was compiled by Adler and Hutchins. He is represented by “Little Dorrit” one of his less well known novels.
See
Dickens is unfairly ignored here. He is a bigger figure than he gets credit for. It’s a shame he kind of occupies no man’s land where he isn’t genre, but isn’t quite highbrow. I already have Marx and Austen on the list so that takes up the societal class conscious theme. I really wouldn’t have a problem including him
idk bout tree fiddy
this curriculum is not that unique anon, i will be shocked if their philosophy department doesn't specialize in The Following
Most Continental philosophy departments at universities around the world offer some courses or selected readings on many of these thinkers, but many times they get away with making students read summaries or commentaries written by historians of philosophy rather than actual works.
I remember reading about Scholastic theologians and Medieval philosophy for a course on those, but I don't think I read more than 20 pages in total of works written by actual Medieval philosophers (such as St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas).
Likewise, I remember the one Modern philosophy course I took had selected readings from Descartes' Meditations, Leibniz' Monadology, and pieces of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, even though we also got to discuss other thinkers from that era (like Spinoza and Berkeley).
I remember the only time I ever had to read Marx for class was back when I read like 30 pages or so from Das Kapital, vol. 1 in a Sociology course.
So the point of the matter is that even though Philosophy courses offered at universities do expose students to a variety of these names and great theories, they don't always make them read the original works themselves.
My updated list
>Homer
>KJV bible
>Greek tragedians
>Plato
>Aristotle
>Virgil
>Ovid
>Dante
>Boccaccio
>Chaucer
>Rabelais
>Montaigne
>Shakespeare
>Cervantes
>Milton
>Moliere and Racine
>Goethe
>Austen (she probably has a bigger influence on literature than I’d like to admit and should be included)
>Emerson and Whitman
>Poe
>Karl Marx (political but he has an influence on literature)
>Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy
>Flaubert
>Nietzsche
>Chekhov and Ibsen
>Henry James
>Freud (subtle influence on a lot of 20th century literature)
>Proust
>Joyce
>Kafka
>Hemingway and Faulkner
>Beckett
>Borges(not too happy including him but I wanted to include a writer who had influence in the dying world of literature. Maybe Nabokov?)
Lots of guys who just miss the cut IMO-Dickens, Balzac, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Woolf, Eliot, Hamsun, Twain, Celine, Lovecraft, etc. This isn’t a best of list so no need to be offended. Melville wrote one of the best novels ever but it didn’t start a movement or anything. Pushkin and Gogol are huge in Russia but not as much in the west. Im no expert so I’d appreciate any additions or subtractions. I made this on the fly so I’m probably forgetting a few
Henry James is massively overrated. Mostly by delusional Americans. Only a homosexual would include that homosexual and ignore Melville.
>Melville
>not a homosexual
Kek. Moby Dick is better than anything James wrote but James was more influential
60 years, if you didn't start in your early teens just give up
what supreme court opinions do they read? Is there a list? Or at least an example or two? I'm genuinely curious.
You can see the assignments for Annapolis and Santa Fe on the following pages:
https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/classes/seminar/annapolis-undergraduate-readings
https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/classes/seminar/santa-fe-undergraduate-readings
Looks like Annapolis reads Marbury v. Madison, Eakin v. Raub, and Dred Scott.
You can see from the links above what's read in full and what's read in excerpts. Math and science readings not included, just the seminar assignments.
I have ~a couple dozen books by one author and like 6 inches of shelf space to completely fill that shelf with a single author. The OCD in me says to complete the one author shelf, even if I’m buying extremely minor and niche book of his. Should I do it or is that too autistic?
newsflash - people read the 3 page reviews of all those books
Why is the list getting easier the further you get?
>Why is the list getting easier the further you get?
Point of no returns.
The inclusion of those scientific texts confuse me, no matter how important to the development of science those works cited were reading them will give you zero practical knowledge. Not even science/engineering students read those, unless out of curiosity, it just seems completely pointless to me.
If the point isn't to produce practicing scientists/engineers, then surely it makes more sense to include them for a comprehensive understanding of how we got from "the earth is still and the heavens move" to "the sun is relatively still and the heavens move, including us", right? I.e., such readings show us more about what problems science had to address, how it addressed them, and how it came to have its methods and divide up its subjects. If one studies it as practiced today, then, yes, you'd be able to go into a lab and get to work, but it would also be taking it for granted without seeing how it was argued for, and whether we still perhaps hold on to a mythologized view of it (for example, it's more instructive to read Copernicus and Galileo and realize that they're actually both wrong, and that their claims were more hypothetical than empirical, and that Kepler was closer to being right, and in part from winging it and trying out ellipses rather than circles for his orbits).
But the thing is reading the originals will leave you with a much less complete vision of those scientific advancements than either a book on the history of those development or simply a plain old college textbook. I really don't see of what use reading Copernicus and whatnot will be to you except if you're reading them after you're already well acquainted with the topic. Furthermore, some of these works will be extremely hard to read for the untrained.
>But the thing is reading the originals will leave you with a much less complete vision of those scientific advancements than either a book on the history of those development or simply a plain old college textbook.
The problem I'd see with the textbook replacing these is that you're more or less only told the overall conclusions of a given thinker, with maybe a little detail given to go over a theorem or formula that we still use, but you're thereby also lacking access to the arguments and the appeals to evidence or descriptions of experiments by the thinkers themselves, i.e., the student would thereby be taking it on a textbook author's authority that so and so was right and so and so was wrong, which seems counter to a practice that emphasizes precise understanding and the need to see the evidence for oneself. This also, in its own way, lends itself to a hagiographic understanding of important figures in science, the most infamous being Copernicus and Galileo, who had a partially correct hypothesis (that the earth moved and the sun is relatively at rest), but also wrong hypotheses (that the orbits are perfect circles, retaining Ptolemaic epicycles), and where they were right, it was without any physical evidence (so no proof of Coriolis effect, and no account of parallax w/r/t the "fixed stars"). It can't be denied that, more or less, most people who defend and like science, still think hagiographically about figures like them or Darwin or so on.
Plus, these are readings as part of a four year undergrad program, it's not like there's no time afterwards for catching up on modern practices, it's not an either/or.
>Furthermore, some of these works will be extremely hard to read for the untrained.
Less than you would think. Copernicus and Galileo are still doing Euclidean geometry, after all. Admittedly, Leibniz and Newton are hard on account of them also developing their respective calculuses (and in Newton's case, having it in mind for the Principia while proving everything in that book from geometry and trig), but knowing basic trig and calculus takes you much further than you're assuming.
Point is, you don't need to know the history of every theory or practice, with all of its errors and fits and abortive starts, to learn or achieve or perform in the subject in question
You don't need to learn the exhaustive history of joinery methods in carpentry to be able to see how they work, their properties, tolerances, etc.
You don't need to read books or whitepapers on or about deprecated programming languages; you don't need to learn the entire history of aviation engineering and its early methods in order to advance the field as it exists today
I haven't seen an instance of modern math prodigies who started with or consulted or relied on ancient books on conic sections and the like; it's just a poor use of one's time and attention if one wants to engage in the actual doing rather than develop an antiquarian interest in the history of the subject
>Point is, you don't need to know the history of every theory or practice, with all of its errors and fits and abortive starts, to learn or achieve or perform in the subject in question
Again, this presumes that the point of reading those things is only because one wants to become a scientist or a mathematician, and is doing so in an inferior way, when the point is rather to be in a position to understand what science is, whether it contributes to our knowledge truly or speciously (and if truly, whether it's wholly true or only true to such and such an extent), whether its purpose is understanding or manipulation of nature for our benefit, whether its attempted applications in the realms of human action and psychology are proper or not, and whether it properly takes the place of religion, and so on, which is all much more befitting of a properly liberal education. The "scientific facts" we take for granted, such as the motion of the earth, or the use of mathematical equations to describe physical phenomena, were done by people putzing around and chancing upon things, not by people studiously learned in The Correct and Proper Methods. This also ignores that some contributions to science that we still use, like Leibniz's development of dynamics, came from looking back at and trying to preserve ideas from the ancients (in Leibniz's case, Aristotle), as though one couldn't learn something instructive when caught up in a modern problem by looking at something older (as the logicians of the early 20th century did with Leibniz).
>I haven't seen an instance of modern math prodigies who started with or consulted or relied on ancient books on conic sections and the like; it's just a poor use of one's time and attention if one wants to engage in the actual doing rather than develop an antiquarian interest in the history of the subject
Literally Descartes, whose particular brand of algebra comes from looking back at Apollonius, or Russell studying Euclid, or Einstein looking back at Maxwell's equations and Galilean relativity to develop special and general relativity. Sure, reading old books of math and science doesn't guarantee breakthroughs, but neither does learning status practices.
>modern
>mentions Descartes from fricking 400 years ago
>Einstein looking back at Maxwell when Maxwell's groundbreaking EM paper was only 40 years old and various elements of his work were still being formalized, and notation still being standardized, for things like vectors and scalars even after Einstein's famed annus mirabilis
you're a smart guy, you know you're being silly
If you'd like to hammer me on using Descartes as an example, have at it, but why should I accept such an arbitrary standard such as prodigies in 2023, especially when the core of the point being made is that generally there's nothing gained by reading anything old? Descartes read math that was a thousand years old by his time, and developed in algebra in light of it.
As for Einstein and Maxwell, let's be clear that the spirit of the argument is still a rejection of bothering with anything that isn't contemporary practice; if you were having the argument with Einstein, you'd be insisting that Maxwell was as irrelevant. (And you ignored the use of Galilean relativity beside.)
>if you were having the argument with Einstein, you'd be insisting that Maxwell was as irrelevant.
laughably false, since the field itself was still so relatively (ha) new. In any case there are plenty of math and logic texts from the 1970s that I would still happily employ, and certain even older texts like Whitehead's An Introduction to Mathematics have utility, but the ancient scientific lit is too dead, too removed from modernity and modern standards, to be reasonably made mandatory.
>various elements of his work were still being formalized
Yeah that's another thing I think a lot of people don't realize, a lot of groundbreaking theories went through many changes, mostly in notation and how they're formalized but often also had a lot of new developments added to them, to the point where students today learn them in very different forms than what they originally were, not only that but past scientists were already working upon those "finished" forms of those past works so that unless you're very strict in following a very complete chronology of scientific development you're going to end up with large gaps in your understanding and (probably) very confused on how certain theories built upon each other. That's why studying the history of science is commonly something you do only after you know the science itself, and even then I remember in college studying the originals and being surprised when equations I already knew somehow looked like black magic to me.
About three fiddy
Hey, this is awesome! They started with the Greeks! Finally, someone actually listened!
Depends on the effort. If you read this like they expect a student to, about 3.5 years. If you read this, with unlimited free time and without burning out? 1.5 - 2 years.
You, personally? You will never finish this. You haven't the mental fortitude to. This is why you make stupid posts on IQfy while you waste away your life instead of improving forward towards anything at all. The only benefit you have to existing is that you are probably in debt, or will be soon, and you give various websites that extra 1 view in traffic. If voting weren't bullshit, you probably do that, too, giving some pretend form of validation to the system you live under. It doesn't have to be this way. You can always change right now. You won't though, because you're a pathetic loser, and so is the other idiots that are reading this. You will never see yourself at your peak potential, or even remotely close to your potential. I don't mean financially, either. I mean it in every way.
Have a nice rest of your day, anons.
>elements of chemistry
what a bunch of pseuds lmao
Is Leibniz a good writer? I literally only know him for his mathematical influence (and his fight with Newton)