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What does
it mean
to come
home?
Which authors
and works
will I read at
St. John’s?
Do we learn
the most
important
things from
teachers?
Aristotle
*
Nicomachean Ethics,
*
Poetics,*Metaphysics,
On Generation and
Corruption,
*
Physics,
*
Politics, Parts of
Animals, Generation
of Animals
Euclid
Elements
*
Lucretius
On the Nature
of Things
*
Plutarch
“
Lycurgus,” “Solon”
Nicomachus
Arithmetic
Lavoisier
Elements of
Chemistry
Harvey
Motion of the Heart
and Blood
Essays by:
Archimedes,
Fahrenheit,
Avogadro, Dalton,
Cannizzaro, Virchow,
Mariotte, Driesch,
Gay-Lussac,
Spemann,
J. J. Thomson,
Mendeleyev,
Berthollet,
J. L. Proust
Ptolemy
Almagest
What is anopening question?
At the beginning of all seminars and many tutorials,
a tutor poses a question on the assigned reading. The
question serves as a jumping-off point for discussion;
it may be pursued throughout the session or not at all.
What matters is the thought and conversation it provokes.
The reading list below is annotated with but a small
sampling of the wide range of possible opening questions.
What are the
consequences
of denying
the goddess
of Love?
What do we
reveal about
ourselves when
we speak
about love?
*
These authors and works are read in seminar. The others
are distributed among the tutorials and the laboratory.
Freshman
Year
*
Homer
Iliad,
Odyssey
*
Aeschylus
Agamemnon,
Libation Bearers,
Eumenides,
Prometheus Bound
*
Sophocles
Oedipus Rex, Oedipus
at Colonus, Antigone,
Philoctetes
*
Thucydides
PeloponnesianWar
*
Euripides
Hippolytus,
Bacchae
*
Herodotus
Histories
*
Aristophanes
Clouds
*
Plato
Meno,
Gorgias,
Apology, Crito,
Phaedo, Republic,
Parmenides,
Theaetetus,
Sophist, Timaeus,
Symposium,
Phaedrus
Pascal
Treatise on the
Equilibrium
of Liquids
Do we do everything
we do for the sake
of happiness?
Do names
determine the
way we look
at things in
scientific
inquiry?
Why is the
Pythagorean
Theorem true?
Can the
infinite be
defined?
Is nature
fundamentally
random?
Can experimentation
demonstrate the
existence of atoms?
What is
heat?