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blewboarwastake commented on St. John’s Reading List: A Great Books Curriculum   sjc.edu/academic-programs... · Posted by u/Tomte
thwayunion · 3 years ago
(edit: apparently these are just "books tagged mathematics", not the mathematics tutorial reading list. First and second paragraphs mostly hold)

I went through a great books curriculum (not in math), and this list reminds me of my primary complaint with the whole Great Books approach. "Great Books" is mired in fairly a ridiculous fetishism of the Greek classics, the Enlightenment era, the American founding, and the Anglo view of the western world.

This works... well enough... in Philosophy and History and the like. But it's a much larger problem in Mathematics where the field is essentially unrecognizable from the way it would've been taught in 1920 or whatever.

I really like the general approach, but the cultural baggage grates and for Mathematics in particular leads to odd selections. Sometimes you feel like your reading list is being commanded from the grave by a sort of snobby Oxbridge man who, in 1980, was already transparently classist in a kind of irrelevant and borderline senile way.

With respect to this list in particular, the critical points of the Grundlagenkrise are hardly covered at all despite having so many wonderful candidates for short illustrative texts that fit the Great Books tradition perfectly. Russell is predictably floating around (see paragraph 1) even though... well, yawn. And the emphasis on Physics and Natural Philosophy over the development of the science of computing is a shocking oversight given the sheer accessibility of the topic and its importance to the modern world. I'm honestly not sure what eg Darwin is doing in this list (despite being a good candidate in any great books curriculum).

Also, significantly more coverage of the development of arithemtic in the Arab world and simultaneous developments of various things in both the Indian subcontinent and in the far east. The Greek fetishism strikes hard in that first year; no one born after 1850 needs that much Euclid.

Where is the development of probability theory? Texts from Riemann, Boole, Laplace, Fermat, Galois, and especially Euler seem more important than Bacon or certainly Franklin.

Etc.

blewboarwastake · 3 years ago
I found this guy in a random recommended on youtube[1], he is working on a great books curriculum type course that incorporates literature from cultures from the Middle-east, India, Far-east, etc. The complete reading list is in his homepage.

[1] https://www.alexanderarguelles.com/great-books/

u/blewboarwastake

KarmaCake day1046July 31, 2020View Original