3.27.00

By: RyoKazama534

As the piles of mail from colleges come in "begging" for my application, I carefully read each admission dean's letter, and casually skim the pages of the basic outline of the college. It becomes a daily ritual, and each school seems to meld into the next. But one booklet stands out of the crowd. A beige booklet with dozens of writers' names written on the cover.



These are the reasons...I will not apply to St. John's College.

The St. John's Reading List

Freshman Year

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, Apolog, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium, Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Timaeus, Phaedrus
Aristotle -- Poetics, Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, On Generation and Corruption, The 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, Thomson, Mendeleyev, Berthollet, J.L. Proust

Sophomore Year

The Bible
Aristotle -- De Anime, On INterpretation, Prior Analytics, Categories
Apollonius -- Conics Virgil -- Aeneid
Plutarch -- Caesar, 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 Revolution 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 a 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

Cervantes -- Don Quixote
Galileo -- Two New Sciences
Hobbes -- Leviathan
Descartes -- Mediations, Ruls for the Direction of the MInd
Milton -- Paradise Lost
La Fontaine -- Fables
Pascal -- Pensees
Huygens -- Treatise on Light, On the Movement of Bodies by Impact
Eliot -- Middlemarch
Spinoza -- Theologico-Political Treatise
Locke -- Second Treatise of Government
Racine -- Phaedre
Newton -- Princiia Mathematica
Kepler -- Epitome IV
Leibniz -- Monadology, Discourse on Methaphysics, Essay on Dynamics, Philosophical Esays, 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
Austen -- Pride and Prejudice
Dedekind -- Essay on the Theory of Numbers
Essays by: Young, Maxwell, Taylor, Euler, D. Bernoulli

Senior Year

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
Lobachevsky -- Theory of Parallels
Tocqueville -- Democracy in America
Lincoln -- Selected speeches
Kierkegaard -- Philosophical Fragments, Fear and Trembling
Wagner -- Tristan and Isolde
Marx -- Capital, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology
Dostoevski -- Brothers Karamazov
Tolstoy -- War and Peace
Melville -- Benito Cereno
Twain -- The Adventurs 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 Soulds of Black Folk
Heidegger -- What is Philosophy?
Heisenberg -- The Physical Principles of teh Quantum Theory
Einstein -- Selected papers
Millikan -- The Electron
Conrad -- Heart of Darkness
Faulkner - The Bear
Poems by: Years, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Baudelaire, Rimbaud
Esasys by: Faraday, J.J. Thomson, Mendel, Nikowski, Rutherford, Davisson, Schrodinger, Bohr, Maxwell, De Broigle, Dreisch, Orsted, Ampere, Boveri, Sutton, Morgan, Beadle & Tatum, Sussman, Watson & Crick, Jacob & Monod, Hardy

Curriculum

Seminar (Four Years) -- philosophy, theology, political science, literature, history, economics, psychology
Mathematics (Four Years) -- geometry, astronomy, algebra, calculus, relativity
Language (Four Years) -- ancient Greek, French, English Composition
Science (Three Years) -- biology, chemistry, atomic theory, physics
Music -- theory, composition

All right, I'm sure in effect, this is a good college. In fact, I have read a number of the books listed (not nearly close to all). But I don't want to be literally living in The Dead Poets' Society. Thank you, I'll just file it in...the maybe next time section.


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