Re: Good Lit

Robbie could tell you about St. John's reading list -- here's a list of core
books for a somewhat similar institution (the University of Dallas):

http://www.udallas.edu/bgs/corephd.html

I'd get an anthology of Pre-Socratics, read Homer, then Plato, Aristotle,
Virgil, Ovid, the New and Old Testaments, St. Augustine (Confessions and City of
God -- at least an abridged version of the latter), Leibniz, Spinoza, Descartes,
Hume.

Then from this point you have to decide if you want to follow philosophy,
theology, or literature. If you want to follow lit, pick up Norton Anthologies
of English Lit (I then II) or American Lit. (I then II) and go from there.

If you want to follow philosophy, you should probably read Kant, Hegel,
Schopenhauer, Darwin, Freud, Marx, Nietzche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger (to follow
German philosophy).

>From this point you can go British, American, or French.

Walter Kaufmann's _Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre_ is pretty good and
will introduce you to some of the French thinkers. To follow the French
tradition, you can pick up from here and read Rousseau, Sartre, Camus, Derrida,
Lyotard, Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Baudrillard.

William James, Justus Buchler, and Robert Corrington would take you nicely into
20th century American philosophy from here if you don't want to follow the
French tradition.

Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittegenstein (ok,
he's German, but was hanging out in England) for the British philosophers.

Robert C. Solomon's _Introducing Philosophy: A Text with Integrated Readings_
(7th ed., 2001) is very good for an initial overview and can guide you to
specific texts.

Theology runs parallel to philosophy, really -- start with Luther and Erasmus,
then Calvin, then Kant/Hegel, then Schleiermacher, then Heidegger (Being and
Time), then Karl Barth/Rudolph Bultmann, Paul Tillich, Hans Kung. I'm really
following the Protestant tradition here.

As you pick up any of these books you'll see reference to other authors -- I've
left huge gaps that you can fill in pretty easily if you pick up these books and
see who they pay attention to. I wouldn't read Kant without reading Leibniz's
_Monadology_ and Hume. I wouldn't read Heidegger without reading Kant's
_Critique of Pure Reason_, Aristotle's _Metaphyics_, and Parmenides.

happy reading. :)

Jim

-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
Received on Thu Oct 31 13:57:49 2002