Seminars VII and VIII
In 1988, PLS student Brian Farmer recognized that three years isn't nearly enough time to engage all teachers of the Great Books. He surveyed the faculty of the Program of Liberal Studies faculty and assembled readings lists for Seminars VII and VIII.
Seminar VII and VIII Reading List
Aristophanes: Lysistrata
Aristotle: De Anima
Aristotle: Metaphysics
Euripides: Bacchae
Xenephon: Memorabilia
Plato: Timaeus
Ovid: Metamorphoses
Cicero: De Finibus, De Officiis, De Re Publica, De Natura Deorum
Plutarch: Parallel Lives
Seneca: Epistulae Morales
St. Paul: Epistle to the Romans
Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy
Galen: On the Natural Faculties
Augustine: On the Teacher
Koran
Beowulf
The Song of Roland
Gawain and the Green Knight
Christine de Pizan: The Book of the City of Ladies
William Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, Winter's Tale
Francis Bacon: New Atlantis
Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
William Harvey: On the Motion of the Heart and Blood
Christiaan Huygens: Treatise on Light
Blaise Pascal: "Conversation with Monsieur de Saci"
Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantegruel
Baruch Spinoza: Ethics
George Berkeley: Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous
Boswell: Life of Johnson
Jean de Caussade: Abandonment to Divine Providence
David Hume: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
Immanual Kant: Critique of Judgment, Part II; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals
Leibniz: Monadology
John Milton: Areopagitica, Paradise Lost
Isaac Newton: Opticks
Voltaire: Candide
Henry Adams: Mont St. Michel and Chartress, The Education of Henry Adams
Honoré de Balzak: Pére Goriot
Sadi Carnot: Reflections on the Motive of Power of Fire
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
Charles Darwin: Autobiography
Fyodor Dostoevsky : Crime and Punishment, Short stories, esp. "Notes from the Underground," "Dream of a Ridiculous Man"
George Eliot: Middlemarch
Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure, Tess of the d'Ubervilles
Nathaniel Hawthorne: Scarlet Letter
Hermann von Helmholtz: Popular Scientific Lectures
Soren Kiekegaard: Concluding Unscientific Postscript
Friedrich Nietzsche: Ecce Homo
Therese Raquin: Emile Zola
Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
William Whewell: Thoughts on the Study of Mathematics as a Part of Liberal Education (in the Great Ideas Today ca. 1990)
Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
Joan Andrews: You Reject Them, You Reject Me
Maurice Blondel: Letter on Apologetics
Whittaker Chambers: Witness
Kate Chopin: The Awakening
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: The Divine Milieu
G. K. Chesterton: The Everlasting Man
R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History
Christopher Dawson: The Making of Europe
Mircea Eliade: The Myth of the Eternal Return
T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets
William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury
Etienne Gilson: The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy
Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory
Vassily Grossman: Life and Fate
Dietrich Van Hildebrand: Liturgy of the Hours, Transformation in Christ
James Joyce: Ulysses
Claude Levis-Strauss: The Savage Mind
Henri de Lubac: Catholicism
Bernard Lonergan: Insight
Thomas Mann: Dr. Faustus
Gabriel Marcel: Creative Fidelity
Thomas Merton: The Seven Storey Mountain
Burnt Njal: Icelandic Saga
Flannery O'Connor: The Habit of Being (Letters), Wiseblood
Rudolf Otto: The Idea of the Holy
John Paul, II: Love and Responsibility
Josef Pieper: Leisure the Basis of Culture
Jean-Paul Sartre: The Flies
Erwin Schrödinger: What Is Life?
Wallace Stevens: The Palm at the End of the Mind
Igor Stravinsky: The Poetics of Music
D'Arcy W. Thompson: On Growth and Form
Sigrid Undset: Kristen Lavransdatter
Simone Weil: Gravity and Grace