What year and campus, Tabula Rasa? I’m A’84.
Sf’92
I have a little quibble with this. Yes, great authors are familiar with previous work, but it’s also OK to discover the older work via the newer work. For example, if T.S. Eliot appeals to you, you can enjoy his poetry without digesting all of Dante first. The reverse-chronological approach has worked for me many times – and once I *did *read Dante, rereading Eliot was that much more rewarding.
I can’t really argue with that - my college-level study of math has been entirely via the classics, and I certainly don’t claim to be an expert of educational theory. But, I will say two things.
- If you take liberal arts as a holistic idea, so to speak, I definitely think that it’s definitely important to understand where the modern stuff has come from. If you approach it in a certain way you definitely can see the way that various historical mathematicians built on each other.
- I would argue that at least Euclid and Apollonius are worth studying simply for their own sake. There’s an undeniable elegance to their work, and for most people, studying it from the original is nothing whatsoever like studying math as it’s done in more conventional education. I hated math in high school, especially geometry. When I started studying Euclid, it was like the entire idea of math just changed.
You could also look at the University of Chicago’s Basic Program, which is a four year liberal arts certificate program. They have a reading list that will point you to some classics. Also, you might want to look at universities in your area if you’re interested in discussing what you read with others.
I can’t begin to thank you all enough for pointing me well in the right directions… I really appreciate each of your responses. I now have a much clearer idea of where to start.
Ignorance fought! (now what’s that in Latin?!)
-NB
Would anybody here be interested in a “Great Books” discussion club of some sort?
I’ve been wanting to get into reading a lot of the suggested books (esp. the St. John’s curriculum) since I graduated from college in the spring. I got my degree in Fine Arts (printmaking) and Art History, and while I don’t regret it at all, I feel like in some areas, especially the Classics I’ve almost backslid from where I was when I graduated from High School.
I have copies of many of the books listed, but I can’t seem to make a good start without some external stimulus for deadlines and discussion…
Bertrand Russell’s “History of Western Philosophy” is a very good survey. Its size may be intimidating, but he has a clear style and it’s an easy read for the subject matter. In fact, there is a (presumably bootleg) copy on the web, so you can sample it.
For popular treatments of science, you can’t do much better than Isaac Asimov’s collections of science essays. They’re a bit out of date, but they’re always informative and as bonuses easy to read and entertaining.
Asimov wrote books on many subjects. For example, his guide to Shakespeare is a good survey.
Yes.
I’ve started the St. John’s list several times - and gotten to somewhere around Oedipus before running out of steam.
Would you be interested in starting the St John’s list again from scratch or coming up with a different curriculum? One of the best things (for a cheap gal like me) is that all of that stuff is available for free over at project gutenberg- so we could do a thread every few weeks with a different text and a link so anybody could jump in without dragging themselves and their wallets to the bookstore. A cooperative classical education for $14.95 (or less) a year!
Alternatively, we could pick a survey text to go along with the readings, but I am kind of attracted to the “Great Books only” primary source idea.
I suggest that studying literature and history will draw you into other subjects in oder to better understand what you’re reading.
I’ve been debating whether to continue the hijack, and I guess I’ve settled on doing so. The thing that distinguishes math and other technical disciplines from what most people think of as the liberal arts is that there’s not much room for subjectivity; either what someone is claiming is valid or it’s not, and that can be checked by a computer nowadays. You occasionally do get to hear about a new way of looking at something, but it’s invariably for one of two reasons: either the new way generalizes the old way, or the new way allows the old ideas to be expressed much more succinctly. After the new idea is introduced, the old way may be of limited value to active mathematicians.
That said, there’s certainly some value in reading Euclid, but mainly for a historian or a classicist. More power to you if you enjoyed it.
The historically sequenced study of the underpinnings of what became parts of mathematics in conjuction with the historically sequenced study of the other liberal disciplines (“arts”, even) is a great way to see how reason emerged in humanity (or Western humanity, at least. Disclaimer, disclaimer, etc.) And, it’s a lot more about the questions of “how come?” than the “how to?” There’s something really revealing about studying, for example, the fairly simultaneous and separate development of calculus by Leibniz and Newton. Was that just, somehow, inevitably, the moment for it in human history? Oh, yeah? Why? Are they really systems of comparative power and flexibility to explain, describe, approximate, and calculate? It’s a great conversation. It may not get the wash hung out to dry or the back forty plowed, or the TPS reports in on time, but none of those are really the point of a classical, liberal education.
“At last I said,- Lincoln, you never can make a lawyer if you do not understand what demonstrate means; and I left my situation in Springfield, went home to my father’s house, and stayed there till I could give any proposition in the six books of Euclid at sight. I then found out what demonstrate means, and went back to my law studies.”
-Abraham Lincoln
If you really want to read the original works of great mathematicians, Stephen Hawking has compiled an anthology, called God Created the Integers. But it’s not the best way to learn mathematics for mathematics’ sake; I daresay most people who get degrees in mathematics don’t study those original works. They study the ideas, but presented in more recent, more modern textbooks.
I’d prefer to start from scratch - and you’re right, it does have the benefit of being freely available.
Care to start the thread?