Great Books Reading Plans
Reading plans drawn from Adler's Great Books.
20 works
Great Books Starting Plan
Twenty books from Homer to Dostoyevsky: epic and tragedy, Plato and Aristotle, the Bible and Augustine, then Machiavelli, Locke, Darwin, and Crime and Punishment. This is not the whole canon. It is a first path through the main periods and problems of the Great Books.
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12 works
Faith, Doubt, and the Soul
The Bible, then Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Pascal, Hume, Kierkegaard, and The Brothers Karamazov. The biblical selections give the first account of God and the soul. Every later writer in the plan is answering that account, including those who reject it.
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12 works
How We Know
Euclid, Aristotle, Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Hume, Kant, and Darwin. The plan starts with mathematical proof, then asks whether nature, the mind, and living species can be known in the same way. Darwin is last because he treats species as historical rather than fixed.
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12 works
Power, Law, and the Citizen
Antigone, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, then Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, the Federalist, Tocqueville, and Mill. The sequence follows one political question: what law is, who may make it, and when a citizen may refuse it.
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3 works
The Meditations
Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, then the Enchiridion and Discourses of Epictetus. The notebook is a Roman emperor practicing Stoic ethics. Epictetus comes second because his lectures are the teaching Marcus was using.
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4 works
The Odyssey
The Odyssey, then the Oresteia, the Iliad, and the Aeneid. After Homer, Aeschylus shows a homecoming that fails, the Iliad shows the war Odysseus is returning from, and Virgil rewrites the voyage as the founding story of Rome.
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3 works
The Republic
Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics, and Augustine's City of God. Socrates builds a city in speech to ask whether justice is good even without reward. Aristotle studies real cities and rejects much of that design. Augustine, writing after the sack of Rome, argues that no earthly city can be the final home of the soul.
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