The Wardman Wire

Dave Cole has an article about the books that go to make the foundation of the western tradition of thinking. He lists approximately 100 of the authors, and some of their literary or artistic works, to be studied in a four year degree course at St John’s College, Annapolis.

It begins with:

Homer: Iliad, Odyssey
Aeschylus: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, The Eumenides
Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Philoctetes
Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
Euripides: Hippolytus, The Bacchae
Herodotus: Histories
Aristophanes: Clouds, Birds

and continues with:

Nicolaus Copernicus: On the Revolutions of the Spheres
Martin Luther: On the Freedom of a Christian
François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina: Missa Papae Marcelli

via

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Phenomenology of Mind, “Logic” (from the Encyclopedia)
Albert Einstein: “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”, “Relativity: The Special and General Theory”
Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky: Theory of Parallels
Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
Abraham Lincoln: Selected Speeches

and wraps up with:

Martin Heidegger: What is Philosophy?
Werner Heisenberg: The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory
Robert Millikan: The Electron
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
Essays by: Michael Faraday, J.J. Thomson, Gregor Mendel, Hermann Minkowski, Ernest Rutherford, Clinton Davisson, Erwin Schrödinger, Niels Bohr, James Clerk Maxwell, Louis-Victor de Broglie, Dreisch, Hans Christian Ørsted, André-Marie Ampère, Theodor Boveri, Walter Sutton, Morgan, Beadle and Tatum, Gerald Jay Sussman, Watson and Crick, Jacob & Monod, G. H. Hardy

Dave mentions that he has read 37 of the texts, and asks what is missing.

My count of works I have read comes to roughly 12 (!) plus parts of some more in anthologies. I feel slightly better because at least some of my reading was in Latin (OK: ‘O’ level Latin, sections of the Aeneid). So much for an engineering education; perhaps I should start asking Dave about mathematical convolutions.

I also have a strange allergy to English Classics of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Who would I add

Dave also asks which other authors and works should be added. I think the list as presented is light on the medieval period, and on the democratic tradition in Europe.

I would apply two criteria, that authors and works should be:

• Significant in themselves.
• Are definitive of an era or tradition.

I’ve also indulged myself slightly in going beyond a selection that I think relates to academic philosophy. I would add the following:

Early work

• Beowulf

Medieval

• Pilgrim’s Progress

and at least one of:

• The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis.

• The Cloud of Unknowing.

• Revelations of Divine Love.

• or the later The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola.

I’m also wondering about:

• Book of Common Prayer alongside Shakespeare and the King James Bible.

I’m tempted to add Richard Hooker (as the effective founder of Anglican thought), and John Wesley (this would be as an overall contribution not a single work).

I would also add a more eclectic selection:

• The Quran (I say it has sufficient influence to be included).
• Further Roman poets.
• Galileo.
• Jonathon Swift?

And in “European Democratic Documents”

• Magna Carta (obviously).
• The Bill of Rights, and other UK legislation.
• The French Revolutionary Documents.

For the modern period:

• Certainly Bonhoeffer.
• Perhaps Barth and Hegel,
• Winston Churchill.
• The Charter of the United Nations.

And in a Liberal Arts college, I would also include Alistair Cooke as an overall introduction to modern American history. I would supply selected radio programmes from his full set of 3000 Letters from America on an iPOD.

And that’s without even addressing other media such as film. What price D.W.Griffith, who defined the grammar of the movie.

OK. Enough.

Wrapping Up

Which authors and would be in your literary canon?

Have a look at the full list, and leave a comment.

I suspect that Dave has also written a golden piece of search engine fodder, that will keep him occupied with intellectual comments by eclectic visitors for months.

Tags: western literary canon, dave cole, annapolis, winston churchill, richard hooker, bonhoeffer, greek philosophy