<story><title>St. John’s Reading List: A Great Books Curriculum</title><url>https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-books-reading-list</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thwayunion</author><text>(edit: apparently these are just &amp;quot;books tagged mathematics&amp;quot;, not the mathematics tutorial reading list. First and second paragraphs mostly hold)&lt;p&gt;I went through a great books curriculum (not in math), and this list reminds me of my primary complaint with the whole Great Books approach. &amp;quot;Great Books&amp;quot; is mired in fairly a ridiculous fetishism of the Greek classics, the Enlightenment era, the American founding, and the Anglo view of the western world.&lt;p&gt;This works... well enough... in Philosophy and History and the like. But it&amp;#x27;s a much larger problem in Mathematics where the field is essentially unrecognizable from the way it would&amp;#x27;ve been taught in 1920 or whatever.&lt;p&gt;I really like the general approach, but the cultural baggage grates and for Mathematics in particular leads to odd selections. Sometimes you feel like your reading list is being commanded from the grave by a sort of snobby Oxbridge man who, in 1980, was already transparently classist in a kind of irrelevant and borderline senile way.&lt;p&gt;With respect to this list in particular, the critical points of the Grundlagenkrise are hardly covered at all despite having so many wonderful candidates for short illustrative texts that fit the Great Books tradition perfectly. Russell is predictably floating around (see paragraph 1) even though... well, yawn. And the emphasis on Physics and Natural Philosophy over the development of the science of computing is a shocking oversight given the sheer accessibility of the topic and its importance to the modern world. I&amp;#x27;m honestly not sure what eg Darwin is doing in this list (despite being a good candidate in any great books curriculum).&lt;p&gt;Also, significantly more coverage of the development of arithemtic in the Arab world and simultaneous developments of various things in both the Indian subcontinent and in the far east. The Greek fetishism strikes hard in that first year; no one born after 1850 needs that much Euclid.&lt;p&gt;Where is the development of probability theory? Texts from Riemann, Boole, Laplace, Fermat, Galois, and especially Euler seem more important than Bacon or certainly Franklin.&lt;p&gt;Etc.</text></item><item><author>codybontecou</author><text>Huh, this is neat. If you click on a book&amp;#x27;s subject(s), it will then take you to the specific topic and a reading list tailored to it.&lt;p&gt;For example, this is their Mathematics reading list: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.sjc.edu&amp;#x2F;academic-programs&amp;#x2F;undergraduate&amp;#x2F;subjects&amp;#x2F;mathematics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.sjc.edu&amp;#x2F;academic-programs&amp;#x2F;undergraduate&amp;#x2F;subjects...&lt;/a&gt;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>voldacar</author><text>Computing is not yet old enough for us to know which books on computing are great books.&lt;p&gt;Also the point of reading Euclid is not really to learn geometry but rather to investigate and examine the oldest, most primordial expression of the idea that math should be formalized using a few axioms.</text></comment>
<story><title>St. John’s Reading List: A Great Books Curriculum</title><url>https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-books-reading-list</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thwayunion</author><text>(edit: apparently these are just &amp;quot;books tagged mathematics&amp;quot;, not the mathematics tutorial reading list. First and second paragraphs mostly hold)&lt;p&gt;I went through a great books curriculum (not in math), and this list reminds me of my primary complaint with the whole Great Books approach. &amp;quot;Great Books&amp;quot; is mired in fairly a ridiculous fetishism of the Greek classics, the Enlightenment era, the American founding, and the Anglo view of the western world.&lt;p&gt;This works... well enough... in Philosophy and History and the like. But it&amp;#x27;s a much larger problem in Mathematics where the field is essentially unrecognizable from the way it would&amp;#x27;ve been taught in 1920 or whatever.&lt;p&gt;I really like the general approach, but the cultural baggage grates and for Mathematics in particular leads to odd selections. Sometimes you feel like your reading list is being commanded from the grave by a sort of snobby Oxbridge man who, in 1980, was already transparently classist in a kind of irrelevant and borderline senile way.&lt;p&gt;With respect to this list in particular, the critical points of the Grundlagenkrise are hardly covered at all despite having so many wonderful candidates for short illustrative texts that fit the Great Books tradition perfectly. Russell is predictably floating around (see paragraph 1) even though... well, yawn. And the emphasis on Physics and Natural Philosophy over the development of the science of computing is a shocking oversight given the sheer accessibility of the topic and its importance to the modern world. I&amp;#x27;m honestly not sure what eg Darwin is doing in this list (despite being a good candidate in any great books curriculum).&lt;p&gt;Also, significantly more coverage of the development of arithemtic in the Arab world and simultaneous developments of various things in both the Indian subcontinent and in the far east. The Greek fetishism strikes hard in that first year; no one born after 1850 needs that much Euclid.&lt;p&gt;Where is the development of probability theory? Texts from Riemann, Boole, Laplace, Fermat, Galois, and especially Euler seem more important than Bacon or certainly Franklin.&lt;p&gt;Etc.</text></item><item><author>codybontecou</author><text>Huh, this is neat. If you click on a book&amp;#x27;s subject(s), it will then take you to the specific topic and a reading list tailored to it.&lt;p&gt;For example, this is their Mathematics reading list: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.sjc.edu&amp;#x2F;academic-programs&amp;#x2F;undergraduate&amp;#x2F;subjects&amp;#x2F;mathematics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.sjc.edu&amp;#x2F;academic-programs&amp;#x2F;undergraduate&amp;#x2F;subjects...&lt;/a&gt;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tessierashpool</author><text>this is not intended as any kind of rebuttal, but the Santa Fe campus of St. John&amp;#x27;s has an Asian classics graduate degree which brings in some missing material from the Indian subcontinent (and elsewhere, of course, but you specifically mentioned India).&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t recall if it addresses math in particular, however. my guess is no. the grad school is kind of eager about granting people excuses to skip math, and I get the impression that they have to be, because otherwise they&amp;#x27;d go out of business.&lt;p&gt;anyway, if you did both that degree and the undergraduate degree, you could claim a more credible, globe-spanning Great Books education, although it would still have plenty of caveats and flaws.</text></comment>