Great Books of the Western World

Reading the Great Books is a daunting task--almost herculean. Beginning with the Great Converstation, the 54 volume set will take at least, according to editors, 10 years of reading. And, even then when you complete the entire set, the editors encourage more reading, and re-reading, of the same books--in order to fully comprehend what the authors were writing about. So far, I have only two books of the 54 volume set (there is a newer 60 volume set). The first volume is the Great Conversation book. It explains what a Liberal Education is all about, why the great books have disappeared from our "modern" educational curriculum, and what has been lost. The Great Books comprise a reading list that date back nearly 2,500 years. From Homer to Freud, these books are the epitome of Western culture. These books are "a means of understanding our society and ourselves." (volume I, pg. 2) Authors Homer * Aeschylus * Sophocles * Euripides * Aristophanes * Herodotus * Thucydides * Plato * Aristotle * Hippocrates * Galen * Euclid * Archimedes * Apollonius * Nicomachus * Lucretius * Epictetus * Marcus Aurelius * Virgil * Plutarch * Tacitus * Ptolemy * Copernicus * Augustine * Thomas Aquinas * Dante * Chaucer * Machiavelli * Hobbes * Rabelais * Montaigne * Shakespeare * Gilbert * Galileo * Harvey * Cervantes * Francis Bacon * Descartes * Spinoza * Milton * Pascal * Newton * Huygens * Locke * Berkeley * Hume * Swift * Sterne * Fielding * Montesquieu * Rousseau * Adam Smith * Gibbon * Kant * American State Papers * The Federalist * J.S. Mill * Boswell * Lavoisier * Fourier * Faraday * Hegel * Goethe * Melville * Darwin * Marx * Engles * Tolstoy * Dostoevsky * William James * Freud Additional Authors The second edition included several new books. It was a much needed update to the original set. Twentith century authors were lacking in the original set, and this new list made up a lack of representation. John Calvin * Erasmus * Molière * Jean Racine * Voltaire * Denis Dedirot * Kierkegaard * Nietzsche * Tocqueville * Honoré de Balzac * Austen * Eliot * Dickens * Twain * Ibsen * Bergson * Dewey * Whitehead * Russell * Heidegger * Wittgenstein * Barth * Poincaré * Planck * Einstein * Eddington * Bohr * Hardy * Heisenberg * Schrödinger * Dobzhansky * Waddington * Veblen * Tawney * Keynes * Frazer * Weber * Huizinga * Lévi-Strauss * James * Shaw * Conrad * Chekhov * Pirandello * Proust * Cather * Mann * Joyce * Woolf * Kafka * Lawrence * Eliot * O'Neill * Fitzgerald * Faulkner * Brecht * Hemingway * Orwell * Beckett Back * Home