the Books

While not an exhaustive list, these works are required in their respective Great Books (GBK) courses.

GBK 101: Among Gods and Heroes

Homer: The Iliad and The Odyssey
Aeschylus: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides
Sophocles: Oedipus the King and Antigone or Oedipus at Colonus
Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War (selections)
Plato: Euthyphro and Apology

GBK 202: Classical Cultures

Plato: The Republic and Meno
Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics (selections)
Euclid: The Elements (selections)
Virgil: The Aeneid

GBK 203: The Hebrew and Christian Traditions

Hebrew Bible: Genesis 1-11, Exodus 1-24, Jeremiah 1-33, Isaiah 40-55 and Job
New Testament: Galatians and Romans
Augustine: Confessions (selections)
Aquinas: Summa Theologica (selections)

GBK 304: Order and Ingenuity

Dante: The Divine Comedy (selections)
Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (selections)
Machiavelli: The Prince
Cervantes: Don Quixote (selections)
Luther or Calvin: Selections
Galileo: “The Two Chief World Systems” (selections)
Montaigne: Essays (selections)

GBK 305: The Modern Worldview

Shakespeare: Hamlet and King Lear
Bacon: The New Organon (selections)
Descartes: Discourse on Method
Pascal: Pensees (selections)
Hobbes: Leviathan (selections)
Newton: Principia (selections)
Locke: Second Treatise of Government
Hume: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (selections)
Milton: Paradise Lost

GBK 306: Reason and Revolution

Rousseau: The Social Contract
Goethe: Faust
Smith: Wealth of Nations (selections)
Jefferson: “Declaration of Independence”
Hamilton: The Federalist Papers (selections)
Romantic Poets: Selections
Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (selections)
Tocqueville: Democracy in America (selections)
Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto
Austen: Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion
Emerson: Essays: First Series or THOREAU: Walden
Darwin: The Origin of Species (selections)

GBK 407: The Age of Ambivalence

Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
Peirce: “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”
Mendel: “Experiments in Plant Hybridizations”
Freud: Civilization and its Discontents (or another selection)
Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Nietzsche: Twilight of the Idols (or another selection)
Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk

GBK 495: Special Topics (Subtitle)

The special topics course is not being offered this academic year.