Gutenberg College is a classical “Great Books” college which offers a curriculum centered on reading and discussing those writings that have been most significant in the formation of Western culture. Taken together, these writings constitute a “Great Conversation.” Through several centuries of this extended conversation, the most important issues facing mankind surface time after time: Who is man? Who is God? What is the relationship between them? How ought one live one’s life? Studying the writings of the foremost thinkers of our culture gives students the opportunity to examine different perspectives on these important questions. In a sense, students learn at the feet of great thinkers.
Here are some of the authors and works read in Gutenberg’s curriculum:
- The Epic of Gilgamesh
- Enuma Elish
- Genesis
- Exodus
- Deuteronomy
- Homer, Iliad and Odyssey
- Hesiod, Works and Days
- Herodotus, The Histories
- Aristophanes, “The Clouds”
- Aeschylus, “Agamemnon”
- Sophocles, “Oedipus the King”
- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
- Plato, Collected Works
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Categories, and Poetics
- Archimedes
- Virgil, Aeneid
- Cicero
- Tacitus, Annals
- Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
- Plutarch, Lives
- Gospel of Matthew
- I Corinthians
- Acts of the Apostles
- Galatians
- Augustine, Confessions and The City of God
- Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
- Dante, Divine Comedy
- Machiavelli, The Prince
- Erasmus, In Praise of Folly and Freedom of the Will
- Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres
- Luther, Freedom of the Will
- Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion
- Shakespeare, Hamlet, King Lear, Measure for Measure, Coriolanus, Macbeth
- Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
- Kepler
- Hobbes, Leviathan
- Spinoza, Ethics
- Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Second Treatise on Government
- Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy and Discourse on Method
- Newton, Principia Mathematica
- Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
- Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
- Voltaire, Candide
- Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense
- Hume, Treatise on Human Nature
- Rousseau, The Social Contract
- Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
- Smith, The Wealth of Nations
- Kant, Critique of Judgment and Ground for the Metaphysics of Morals
- Goethe, Faust
- Hegel, Philosophy of History
- Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
- Austen, Mansfield Park
- Federalist Papers
- U.S. Constitution
- Hawthorne
- Tocqueville, Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the French Revolution
- Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
- Mill, Utilitarianism
- Darwin, On the Origin of Species
- Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity and Concluding Unscientific Postscript
- Thoreau, Walden
- Marx, Das Kapital
- George Eliot, Silas Marner
- Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment
- Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilych, and What is Art?
- James, Pragmatism
- Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil and Genealogy of Morals
- Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
- Einstein, various papers
- Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and “Dubliners”
- Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac
- T. S. Eliot, poems
- Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and The Economic Consequences of the Peace
- MacIntyre, After Virtue
- Galbraith, The New Industrial State (selection)
- Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
- Ellul, The Technological Society and Propaganda
- C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces and The Discarded Image
- Solzhenitsyn, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and “A World Split Apart”
- Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
- Francis Schaeffer, Escape from Reason
- Flannery O’Connor, stories
- Kafka, “Metamorphosis”
- Foucault, The Order of Discourse
- Wolterstorff, Art in Action