Reading List (1972 Edition)
- Homer – Iliad, Odyssey
- The Old Testament
- Aeschylus – Tragedies
- Sophocles – Tragedies
- Herodotus – Histories
- Euripides – Tragedies
- Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War
- Hippocrates – Medical Writings
- Aristophanes – Comedies
- Plato – Dialogues
- Aristotle – Works
- Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus
- Euclid – Elements
- Archimedes – Works
- Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections
- Cicero – Works
- Lucretius – On the Nature of Things
- Virgil – Works
- Horace – Works
- Livy – History of Rome
- Ovid – Works
- Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia
- Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania
- Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic
- Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion
- Ptolemy – Almagest
- Lucian – Works
- Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
- Galen – On the Natural Faculties
- The New Testament
- Plotinus – The Enneads
- St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
- The Song of Roland
- The Nibelungenlied
- The Saga of Burnt Njál
- St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica
- Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy
- Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
- Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks
- Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
- Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly
- Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
- Thomas More – Utopia
- Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises
- François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel
- John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion
- Michel de Montaigne – Essays
- William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
- Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote
- Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
- Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis
- William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays
- Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
- Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
- William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
- Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan
- René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
- John Milton – Works
- Molière – Comedies
- Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises
- Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light
- Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics
- John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Thoughts Concerning Education
- Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies
- Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding; Monadology
- Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe
- Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
- William Congreve – The Way of the World
- George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge
- Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man
- Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws
- Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
- Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
- Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets
- David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract
- Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
- Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
- Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
- Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
- James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.
- Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
- Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers
- Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth
- Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
- William Wordsworth – Poems
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria
- Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma
- Carl von Clausewitz – On War
- Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
- Lord Byron – Don Juan
- Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism
- Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
- Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology
- Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy
- Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet
- Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal
- Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter
- Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America
- John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
- Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
- Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times
- Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
- Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden
- Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto
- George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch
- Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
- Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
- Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories
- Henrik Ibsen – Plays
- Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales
- Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger
- William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism
- Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power
- Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method
- Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
- George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces
- Max Planck – Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
- Henri Bergson – Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
- John Dewey – How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic; the Theory of Inquiry
- Alfred North Whitehead – An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
- George Santayana – The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places
- Vladimir Lenin – The State and Revolution
- Marcel Proust – Remembrance of Things Past
- Bertrand Russell – The Problems of Philosophy; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits
- Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
- Albert Einstein – The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
- James Joyce – 'The Dead' in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
- Jacques Maritain – Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism
- Franz Kafka – The Trial; The Castle
- Arnold J. Toynbee – A Study of History; Civilization on Trial
- Jean-Paul Sartre – Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – The First Circle; The Cancer Ward
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