Great Books Foundation’s Reading List
December 28th, 2008 Tagged Challenges
| Henry Adams | The Education of Henry Adams. 1907 |
| Aeschylus | Agamemnon. 458 B.C. |
| Aristotle | Politics. “On Happiness” (excerpt from Nicomachean Ethics). “On Tragedy” 4th Century B.C. |
| Saint Augustine | The City of God. 413-26 |
| Bible | Genesis. Exodus. Job. Ecclesiastes. The Gospel of Mark |
| Edmund Burke | Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790 |
| Geoffrey Chaucer | The Canterbury Tales. c. 1387 |
| Anton Chekhov | Rothschild’s Fiddle. 1894. Uncle Vanya. 1896 |
| Karl von Clausewitz | “What Is War?” (excerpt from On War). 1833 |
| Joseph Conrad | “Heart of Darkness” (story in Typhoon and Youth). 1902 |
| Alighieri Dante | “The Inferno” (canticle in the Divine Comedy) c. 1310-1320 |
| Charles Darwin | “The Moral Sense of Man and The Lower Animals” (excerpts from On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man(1871) |
| John Dewey | “The Virtues” (excerpt from Ethics) 1908. “Habits and Will” (excerpt from Human Nature and Conduct) 1922 |
| Denis Diderot | Rameau’s Nephew. 1805 |
| Fyodor Dostoevsky | Notes from the Underground. 1864 |
| Euripides | Medea. Iphigenia at Aulis. 5th century B.C. |
| Gustave Flaubert | “A Simple Heart” (short story) c. 1850 |
| Sigmund Freud | “On Dreams” (excerpt from The Interpretation of Dreams) 1900 |
| Edward Gibbon | The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 1776, 1781, 1787-88 |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Faust, Part I. 1808 |
| Nikolai Gogol | “The Overcoat” (first part of novel Dead Souls) 1842 |
| Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison | The Federalist. 1787-88 |
| Herodotus | “The Persian War” (excerpt from History) 5th century B.C. |
| Thomas Hobbes | Origin of Government. c. 1690 |
| Homer | The Iliad. 8th or 7th century B.C. |
| David Hume | “Of Personal Identity” (excerpt from A Treatise on Human Nature) 1739-40. “Of Justice and Injustice” (excerpt from Essays, Moral and Political) 1739-40 |
| Henry James | The Beast in the Jungle. 1903 |
| Franz Kafka | The Metamorphosis. 1915 |
| Immanuel Kant | Conscience. c. 1781. “First Principles of Morals” (excerpt from Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics). 1785 |
| Soren Kierkegaard | “The Knight of Faith” (excerpt from Fear and Trembling). 1843 |
| John Locke | “Of Civil Government” (excerpt from the Second of his Two Treatises of Government). 1690 |
| Niccolo Machiavelli | The Prince. 1513 |
| Maimonides | “On Evil” (excerpt from Guide for the Perplexed) 12th century |
| Karl Marx | “Alienated Labour” (excerpt from Das Kapital). 1867 |
| Herman Melville | Billy Budd, Sailor. 1924 |
| John Stuart Mill | On Liberty. 1859 Utilitarianism. 1863 |
| Moliere | The Misanthrope. 1666 |
| Michel Montaigne | “Of Experience” 1578 (Book III, Chapter 13 of Essays. |
| Baron de Montesquieu | “Principles of Government” (excerpt from The Spirit of the Laws) 1748 |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1883-92 |
| Plato | The Republic. Symposium. The Crito. The Apology. 4th century B.C. |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | The Social Contract. 1762 |
| Arthur Schopenhauer | “The Indestructability of Our Inner Nature” (excerpt from The World as Will and Representation) 1818 |
| William Shakespeare | Hamlet. 1600-01. Othello. 1604. King Lear. 1606. Anthony and Cleopatra. 1607-08. The Tempest. 1611 |
| George Bernard Shaw | Caesar and Cleopatra. 1899 |
| Georg Simmel | “Individual Freedom” (excerpt from The Philosophy of Money) 1900 |
| Adam Smith | Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776 |
| Sophocles | Antigone. Oedipus the King. 5th century B.C. |
| Jonathan Swift | Gulliver’s Travels. 1726 |
| Henry David Thoreau | Civil Disobedience. 1849 |
| Thuycidides | History of the Peloponnesian War. 5th century B.C. |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | “The Power of the Majority” (excerpt from Democracy in America). 1835, 1840 |
| Leo Tolstoy | The Death of Ivan Ilych. 1886 |
| Max Weber | The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1920 |
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