Comments on: Build your own list: What must people majoring in the humanities and liberal arts know?

By: Laurence D.

Laurence D. — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 08:21:29 +0000

Not Meno ? :(

Nice new venue.

By: Rebecca N.

Rebecca N. — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 04:03:09 +0000

I mostly agree with your list, Ashok, but if you don’t include at least a little Nietzsche (I’m thinking Beyond Good & Evil, but The Birth of Tragedy would be good if you could pick two), you can’t expect to understand the 20th and 21st centuries. Yes?

-Rebecca, with Collegium but not of Collegium

By: John

John — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:14:45 +0000

Looks like a good list. Why not add Thucydides, Plato’s Alcibiades I, the Nicomachean Ethics, Dante’s Divine Comedy, a couple more Shakespeare plays (e.g., The Merchant of Venice and Julius Caesar), Milton’s Paradise Lost, Descartes’ Discourse on Method, Locke’s Second Treatise, and the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution?

Of course, you could keep piling on, but you would have to beware making the list so long that you lose sight of the ends of any sensible undergraduate education. This includes pointing toward some kind of self-knowledge, which becomes utterly impossible if you extend your required reading into an ever receding horizon.