/lit/ - Literature

>>23152643
this is a waste of time

>>23152643
>Nicomachus
>Lavoisier
>Viète
>Newton
>Dedekind
>Lobachevsky
wordcels really thinking they can understand all of math and science by reading a bunch of books published 200 years ago

>>23152679
I doubt that’s the goal, mathcel.

>>23152679
Newton is based, but people shouldn't read his physics, people should read his theology. if you want to learn classical mechanics, read Taylor inshallah

>>23152643
The Hitchcock is an "elective". Juniors and Seniors have what are called a preceptorial that they can choose that lasts about one month at the end of fall semester.

I don't get it. What's the point of reading all this? Why would you not just read it on your own instead of spending 4 years on books which you will forget 95% of?

>>23152759
1) If you're reading it on your own, chances are your pacing will be interrupted frequently, and you'll maybe get through a handful in the same period of time. Being forced to go through the books on a schedule and with grades and essays hanging over you acts as a good incentive to just read the damn things already.

2) It's helpful to have guidance in looking any of these works, and you have access to professors who've gone over them frequently. Class discussion can further sharpen understanding for passages where you have a question and someone may understand it better, and having to defend your reading in that atmosphere can help prevent just taking your initial reading for granted and test your understanding.

3) The math, science, and music portions come with practicums (having to do proofs on the board, doing the experiments described, learning piano and hearing what's going on with the notes of a scale), which helps immensely since they need clarification.

4) The general atmosphere of devotion every day to the books means that social life can keep you thinking about what you've been reading.

That said, it's so general and quick paced that most people really will only have a general grasp unless they become firmly attached to the books. Still, better than bullshitting with a wiki-tier grasp, but there's still a price to pay.

>>23152815
good answer, thanks.

As long as they still start with The Greeks, life is good.

>>23152815
This. It's good for undisciplined normies, which is most of the population. Auto-didacts have little need of it.

How on earth is it possible to read this entire list to any respectable degree of understanding? Am I really supposed to believe that sophomores read the entire Summa Theologiae, which is ~1200 pages of dense scholastic philosophy, on top of 20,000 pages of other dense as fuck stuff that same year? Even if you're attending a seminar by world-renowned Aquinas scholars, I highly doubt they go beyond just one session explaining the 5 Ways arguments, there's just simply not enough to time to do anything else. Blasting through all this in 4 years is insane and I don't believe people do it. >>23152815 sounds right about the "general grasp" of things being the end-stage of 90+% of what people read, which makes it seem nearly pointless imo, since it just leads to the wiki-tier grasp.

>>23154333
It’s been said in other threads that all of these are excerpts and no full texts except maybe plays and Plato dialogues. The preceptorials alone, you have a choice between In Search of Lost Time, Ficciones and the movies of Alfred Hitchcock. There’s no way you can choose between a two hour Hitchcock movie and ISOLT which is half a million words.

>>23152643
Not strictly related to the thread, but DON'T come to St. John's if any of you are thinking about it. It sucks. Most of your classmates will be the same enbie "we read too many dead white men!" retards / ESLs / 2nd generation boba Asians that populate any other college. Also tons of autists. MAYBE you'll find a few more conservative white guys and tradcaths than at most other colleges but they obviously aren't allowed to voice any of their real opinions in class without getting shouted down.
Regardless of the students, the curriculum itself isn't even all that great. You can't possibly read all that and absorb it in 4 years. Most people instantly forget about the seminar readings after they discuss them, and barely anybody remembers any Greek or French. Lab and math are absolutely pointless so I won't even get into them.
I left and don't regret it.

>>23154333
Sophomores read maybe like 100 pages of the Summa. It's almost entirely excerpts, especially after the first year.

>>23154349
>>23154361
What a ridiculous waste. It'd be far better (in my opinion, at least) to cut that list down to like a fifth or less of what it is and read the full texts. It would be far more valuable to go in-depth on a handful of works, than to just read the most famous passages from ten zillion other works.

>>23154368
colleges are absurdly bloated and value quantity over quality i wouldnt besurprised if it was all printouts. they just want to be able to say their students read these things.

>>23154368
>>23154372
Yeah St. John's is shit. They also HATE "historicism" to the extent where something like "Aquinas was Roman Catholic" is a controversial thing to say in seminar if you can't find a passage in the text where he says "I am a Roman Catholic".

>>23152643
>Thomas Pikketty

Go to St. John's if you want to know what a bunch of early-mid 20th century German Jews thought a good Western civilization reading list would be. 100% kosher, of course. Leo Strauss literally taught there lol

>>23154356
Sounds like the drop in quality of the students since I was there has been continuing. It'll implode like Shimer within a decade after Brann dies and the students think they can bully the faculty without consequence.

>>23154333
I'll say that it leads to a better grasp than you'd think, given how much it feels like there is, but the difficulty differs wildly. Freshman year goes back and forth, where reading Homer and the playwrights and historians isn't really hard for grasping, just a lot of busywork, while Plato and Aristotle are shorter readings that up the ante. Sophomore year in general is pretty relaxed, but Junior year is rough and doesn't let up until the last two months of it. But about wiki-tier understanding, I'll put it this way: a wiki-tier understanding is so reliant on some mediated interpretation of this or that, such that directly reading the books, even in a rush, can surprisingly readjust what you thought was going on. (My personal favorite examples of that were the wannabe Marxists actually reading Marx and and starting to put their feet on the breaks.) Obviously, there's a lot of variation in quality between students, but I don't think that's really different anywhere. You'd be surprised how many specialists and experts operate with imposter syndrome going in the background all the time.

>>23154379
Horseshit, that's the kind of common sense thing they don't contest.

>>23154385
Strauss ran optional seminars, he never taught any graded classes there.

>>23154417
No it's not lol. I've been told of an incident where someone asked whether Montaigne was a Christian or not and another said he was, and a third asked "where is that in the text?".

>>23154593
You're gonna have to walk me through the reasoning of how an anecdote about students having a dumb tete-a-tete is representative of the school's overall approach.

>>23152697
what book for newtons theology?

>>23154710
NTA but this article is interesting: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/rediscoverednewton

>>23152643
That is an incredibly based reading list compared to what’s being pushed at other universities.

>>23152643
For film, yes. I'm reading this entire list, btw. I decided that after you posted it last time. I have already begun.

>>23152661
>>23152679
>>23152759
>>23154333
NGMI

>>23154356
I wouldn't go there for two reasons: (1) It's in New Mexico. New Mexico is hot and smells like cow farts. (2) You wouldn't be prepared for a STEM masters. Otherwise, it's an incredible curriculum. All Liberal Arts colleges, as far as I've ever heard, are full of...well, libs. So no surprises there. As for how much you read and whether or not you retain, that's all on you. In a normal college books less books are assigned, but it doesn't mean people read or retain them either. They frequently do not.

>>23154385
Jews teach at most of our institutions. So what? Do you have to agree with everything you're taught? Do you have to accept every idea a professor puts out there no matter what?

>>23154903
>I wouldn't go there for two reasons: (1) It's in New Mexico. New Mexico is hot and smells like cow farts.
There's two campuses, the other one is in Annapolis, Maryland.

>>23152643
>throw shit at the wall willy nilly in a non-developmental non-systematic mosaic hodgepodge

Unspeakably bad.

>>23154368
The track should be divided between Plato & Aristotle, Idealist & Empiricist, Continental & Analytic, and much more focused & reduced. Literature selections in particular-- the Canon simply doesn't have THAT many offerings to be throwing in O'Connor, Washington, Du Bois, Faulkner, TWO Woolf (NONE The Waves) ...

It doesn't respect the students time and isn't aiming for deep understanding and insight into intellectual history of the West to contextualize the present state of affairs.

>>23154333
>How on earth is it possible to read this entire list to any respectable degree of understanding?

Lightweight coursework for nepo-silver spoon Brahmins & future Mandarin Administrators that will be gifted Gentleman's C's regardless of attendance or effort, because that's the bottom line $ for the institution as an oligarchic gatekeeper and anointer of new co-opted blood. One needs the imprimatur of credentials in an environment where one cannot simply insert Babby Jr. into business and political office.

>>23152815
>people really will only have a general grasp unless they become firmly attached to the book

Which is worth nothing while instilling false consciousness in the prospective student with these intellectual travelogues. The General can be had by anyone without the premium.

>>23154297
>It's good for undisciplined normies, which is most of the population. Auto-didacts have little need of it.

What is the Idea behind allowing undisciplined normies in in the first place, and why?

>>23154368
>Plato through Late Platonists through 3rd year, capstone with Kant & Hegel et. al.
>Aristotle & Scholastics to Aquinas, dealer's Analytic Choice 4th

The list is as good as random, because that's the level of end product it's 'good enough' for.

>>23154918
Oh, well that's much better.

>>23154903
Do your research 2 campuses
Auktually New Mexico

>>23154417
>Strauss ran optional seminars, he never taught any graded classes there.
Strauss isn't the only Straussian you disingenuous retard.

>>23155010
I'm disingenuous for being correct, and you're not for shifting goalposts? "Leo Strauss literally taught there", he literally didn't in any sense that matters, e.g. graded classes. "I meant Straussians!" Then say "there's Straussians there", instead of pretending to know what you evidently don't.

>>23152661
an incredible one at that.

>>23155026
I'm not the original poster who made that claim, so you can't accuse me of shifting goalposts. But it's clear that whatever he meant to say, he meant to draw attention to the fact that SJC is hub of Straussians like Strauss, Berns, Bolotin, etc. and fellow travelers like Jacob Klein (who was literally the dean for about a decade).

I know what you were doing. You knew there was more to the story and you tried to obfuscate away from it. It's disingenuous as fuck.

>>23155026
Also, how the fuck can you say that "only graded classes" matter when it comes to fucking Leo Strauss of all people? Nearly all of his influence comes from "optional seminars", often hosted at his own home. Get fucking real.

>>23154933
I think you're being a bit overly pessimistic here, but I did think the same about Woolf and a few others. There are names conspicuously absent from the list as well.

>>23155035
>I know what you were doing. You knew there was more to the story and you tried to obfuscate away from it. It's disingenuous as fuck.
No, what's disingenuous is claiming Strauss taught there when in reality he was a "scholar in residence" for three years offering optional courses open to the public with zero effect on grades. What's further disingenuous is pretending that, having spotted several Straussians between the two campuses, that this meaningfully implies something about the general tenor of the program, as though the it were an insidious training ground for neocons instead of what it is: a book-larnin' school whose "professors" don't even lecture in favor of student-led discussion. Like what do you think happens in classes there? You go in, and the rabbis wave a talmud around until everyone votes for Jeb?

>>23155038
>Nearly all of his influence comes from "optional seminars", often hosted at his own home. Get fucking real.
No it didn't, his influence is solely based on his graded classes and his published books. If you have substantive proof of otherwise, shit or get off the pot.

>>23155079
>No, what's disingenuous is claiming Strauss taught there when in reality he was a "scholar in residence" for three years offering optional courses open to the public with zero effect on grades.
Again with "muh grades." I don't know of a single Straussian who talked about taking a boilerplate graded undergraduate course with Leo Strauss. It's always the "optional seminars", with a small, hand-selected group of motivated students, which left the most impact on the people who went on to carry the legacy forward. So, stop being a disingenuous prick.
>as though the it were an insidious training ground for neocons
Nobody mentioned anything about neocons here. The only thing mentioned here was the fact that you'd be reading what a bunch of early-mid century atheist Jews thought was important. And that's true, considering that the curriculum was largely inspired by Straussian thinking and was crafted by a Straussian fellow traveler, Jacob Klein.
>You go in, and the rabbis wave a talmud around until everyone votes for Jeb?
Straussians wouldn't be interested in religious scripture in itself. They'd be interested in its supposed political subtext. Now you're just out-schizoing the schizo.
>>23155085
Just read any memoir of any Straussian. Mansfield talks about it a lot in his interviews that mention Strauss. You're making up bullshit now.

>>23155089
>I don't know of a single Straussian who talked about taking a boilerplate graded undergraduate course with Leo Strauss. It's always the "optional seminars", with a small, hand-selected group of motivated students, which left the most impact on the people who went on to carry the legacy forward. So, stop being a disingenuous prick.
Horseshit, Strauss offered graded undergraduate and graduate courses, easily verified.

https://leostraussfoundation.org/list-of-strauss-courses/f/strausss-courses-%E2%80%94-a-provisional-list

And a look at any of the interviews with his actual students confirms it was his classes that made the impact.

https://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu/interviews-with-former-students/

>Nobody mentioned anything about neocons here. The only thing mentioned here was the fact that you'd be reading what a bunch of early-mid century atheist Jews thought was important. And that's true, considering that the curriculum was largely inspired by Straussian thinking and was crafted by a Straussian fellow traveler, Jacob Klein.
Kek, no it wasn't. The curriculum is that of Barr and Buchanan in the 30s, before Strauss even set foot in America, and Klein's insidius influence was...making expanding the math and science elements of the program. Do you even know what the differences are between Klein and Strauss, or do you just read "they were friends" and presume they had the same exact project?

>Just read any memoir of any Straussian. Mansfield talks about it a lot in his interviews that mention Strauss. You're making up bullshit now.
No, and wrong. What you're talking about, and Mansfield makes it clear, is a year he had off from teaching classes at Chicago so he could finish research for his book on Aristophanes. Do you think disingenuous just means "I don't like what you're saying," because implying that what happened one year in the 60s during a sabbatical was the norm, and pretending that his influential students weren't from his classes in the 40s and 50s seems awfully disingenuous.