‘The Great Books Scheme’: The Chicago Canon of Western Civilization
.
A list of authors proposed by Mortimer J. Adler, in ‘Great Books, Past and Present’, an Epilogue to G. van Doren (ed.),
Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind
(New York, 1988), 318–50.
Homer
Aeschylus
Sophocles
Herodotus
Euripides
Thucydides
Hippocrates
Aristophanes
Plato
Aristotle
Epicurus
Euclid
Archimedes
Apollonius
Cicero
Lucretius
Virgil
Plutarch
Tacitus
Nicomachus
Epictetus
Ptolemy
M. Aurelius
Galen
St Augustine
St Thomas Aquinas
Dante Alighieri
Chaucer
Machiavelli
Erasmus
Copernicus
Thomas More
Luther
Rabelais
Calvin
Montaigne
W. Gilbert
Cervantes
Bacon
Shakespeare
Galileo
Kepler
W. Harvey
Hobbes
Descartes
Milton
Molière
Pascal
Huygens
Spinoza
Locke
Racine
Newton
Leibniz
Defoe
Swift
Congreve
Bishop Berkeley
Montesquieu
Voltaire
Fielding
Johnson
Hume
Rousseau
Sterne
Adam Smith
Kant
Gibbon
Boswell
Lavoisier
Goethe
Dalton
Hegel
Jane Austen
von Clausewitz
Stendhal
Schopenhauer
Faraday
C. Lyell
A. Comte
Balzac
de Tocqueville
J. S. Mill
Darwin
Dickens
C. Bernard
Kierkegaard
Marx
George Eliot
H. Melville
Dostoevsky
Flaubert
Ibsen
Tolstoy
J. W. R. Dedekind
M. Twain
W. James
Nietzsche
G. Cantor
Freud
D. Hubert
1900–1945
G. B. Shaw
James Joyce
Proust
T. Mann
Joseph Conrad
Faulkner
D. H. Lawrence
T. S. Ellot
Kafka
Chekhov
O’Neill
Henry James
Kipling
J. Dewey
A. N. Whitehead
B. Russell
Santayana
E. Gilson
J.-P. Sartre
J. Ortega y Gasset
Max Planck
Einstein
N. Bohr
E. Schrodinger
J. H. Woodger
J.-H. Poincaré
T. Dobzhansky
G. Sorel
Trotsky
Lenin
W. Sumner
Max Weber
R. H. Tawney
T. Veblen
J. M. Keynes
1945–1977
A. Camus
G. Orwell
T. Pynchon
Solzhenltsyn
S. Bellow
S.Beckett
Wittgenstein
Heidegger
M. Buber
W. Heisenberg
J. Monod
R. P. Feynman
S. Hawking
A. Toynbee
C. Lévi-Strauss
F. Braudel
E. Le Roy Ladurie
Ancient lllyricum and Napoleon’s lllyrian Provinces
The Slavonic and Uralian Language Groups
(after A. Nawrocki)
The Uralian languages
The Slavonic languages
* = language no longer spoken
** = Liturgical language
Runes and Oghams
(
a
) The 33-sign Northumbrian Rune-stave containing earlier 24- and 29-sign staves common in England.
(
b
) The 18-sign Armanen Rune-stave, a modern reconstruction of the most ancient Germanic runic system; and (
below
) possible divinatory connotations (after N. Pennick).
a
.
b
.
The Armanen Runes
number | letter | name | symbol | connotation |
(1) | F | FA | CATTLE | Wealth |
(2) | U | UR | PRIMAL OX | Creative Power |
(3) | Th | THURS | THORN TREE | Lightning/Sudden change |
(4) | A | OS | MOUTH | Wisdom |
(5) | R | RAD/RIT | WHEEL | Journey |
(6) | K | CEN/KA | PINE-TORCH | Fire/Regeneration |
(7) | H | HAGAL | HAIL | Delay |
(8) | N | NOT/NYD | — | Caution |
(9) | I | IS | ICE | Inertia |
(10) | Y | AR | SERPENT | Necessary Evil |
(11) | S | SI6/SIGEL | SUNBEAM | Light/Victory |
(12) | T | TYR | ARROWHEAD | Success |
(13) | B | BAR | BIRCH | Purlty/Rebirth |
(14) | L | LAF | WATER | Lifeforce |
(15) | M | MAN | MAN | Humanity |
(16) | — | YR | YEW, BOW | Skill |
(17) | Kh | EH | CHALICE (Inverted) | Death |
(18) | G | GA/GIBOR | ODIN’S SPEAR | Axle, Fulcrum |
(c) The Basic Irish Ogham-stave.
(
d
) An Irish ‘Bardic Alphabet’; and (below) possible divinatory connotations (after N. Pennick).
c
.
d
.
The Irish Ogham Alphabet: the
beithe-luis
letter | tree | | bird | | colour | dates |
B | beithe | birch | besan | pheasant | White | 24 Dec.–20 Jan. |
L | luis | rowan | lacha | duck | Light Grey | 21 Jan.–17 Feb. |
N | nion | ash | naoscach | snipe | Transparent | 18 Feb.–18 Mar. |
F | fearn | alder | faoileán | gull | Crimson | 19 Mar.–14 Apr. |
S | saileach | willow | seabhac | hawk | Fire | 15 Apr.–12 May |
H | (h)uath | hawthorn | (h)adaig | night crow | Earth | 13 May—9 Jun. |
D | dair | oak | dreoilin | wren | Black | 10 Jun.–7 Jul. |
T | tinne | holly | truit | starling | Grey | 8 Jul.–4 Aug. |
C | coll | hazel | corr | crane | Brown | 5 Aug.–1 Sept. |
M | muin | vine | meantán | titmouse | Motley | 2 Sept.–29 Sept. |
G | gort | ivy | géis | mute swan | Blue | 30 Sept.–27 Oct. |
Ng | (n)getal | broom | (n)gé | goose | Green | 28 Oct.–25 Nov. |
R | ruis | elder | rocnat | rook | Blood-red | 26 NOV.–23 Dec. |
A | ailme | pine | airdhircleog | lapwing | Piebald | Winter Solstice, 1 |
O | onn | furze | odoroscrach | cormorant | Dun | Vernal Equinox |
U | úr | heather | uiseóg | skylark | Resin | Summer Solstice |
E | edad | poplar | ela | whistling swan | Red | Autumn Equinox |
1 | iúr | yew | illait | eaglet | White | Winter Solstice, 2 |
B = Birchday/Sunday; S = Willowday/Monday; T = Hollyday/Tuesday; N = Ashday/Wednesday; D = Oakday/Thursday; Q = Appleday/Friday; F = Alderday/Saturday | ||||||
After C. J. Marstrander et al (eds.), Dictionary of the Irish Language (Dublin, 1913–76), 4 vols. |