Great Books of the Western World

I got to know about this book series when I read How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler. I didn’t pay much attention to actually reading the book series until a few years later when RV told me that he loved Adler’s book and purchased the book set.

I got my copy of the books from a listing on Craigslist. The seller was a doctor who had purchased the books from a library sale many years ago and had even read some of the classics in Latin when he was younger.

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Internet Archive has pdf/text/epub versions to download. Link below -

https://archive.org/details/encyclopaediabritannicagreatbooksofthewesternworld/Encyclop%C3%A6dia%20Britannica%20-%20Great%20Books%20of%20the%20Western%20World%2C%20Volume%201%20-%20The%20Great%20Conversation/

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List of Books

Ref: http://www.greaterbooks.com/adler.html

Book Name	Author	Year Published	Volume
Homer - The Iliad	Homer	c. 8th century BCE	GB Volume 4
Homer - The Odyssey	Homer	c. 8th century BCE	GB Volume 4
Aeschylus - The Suppliant Maidens Aeschylus - The Persians Aeschylus - The Seven Against Thebes Aeschylus - Prometheus Bound Aeschylus - Agamemnon Aeschylus - Choephoroe Aeschylus - Eumenides	Aeschylus	5th century BCE	GB Volume 5
Sophocles - Oedipus The King Sophocles - Oedipus at Colonus Sophocles - Antigone Sophocles - Ajax Sophocles - Electra Sophocles - Trachiniae Sophocles - Philoctetes	Sophocles	5th century BCE	GB Volume 5
Euripides - Rhesus Euripides - Medea Euripides - Hippolytus Euripides - Alcetis Heracleidae - Heracleidae - The Suppliants - The Trojan Women - Ion - Helen - Andromache - Electra - The Bacchantes - Hecuba - Heracles Mad - The Phoenician Maidens - Orestes - Iphigenia Among the Tauri - Iphigenia at Aulis   - The Cyclops	Euripides	5th century BCE	GB Volume 5
Complete Works	Aristophanes	c. 425-388 BCE	GB Volume 5
History	Herodotus	c. 440 BCE	6
History of the Peloponnesian War	Thucydides	c. 400 BCE	6
Dialogues	Plato	c. 399-347 BCE	7
Complete Works	Aristotle	4th century BCE	8, 9
Medical Writings	Hippocrates	c. 400 BCE	10
Elements	Euclid	c. 300 BCE	11
Works	Archimedes	c. 250 BCE	11
On Conic Sections	Apollonius	c. 200 BCE	11
Works	Cicero	1st century BCE	12
On the Nature of Things	Lucretius	c. 50 BCE	12
Works	Virgil	1st century BCE	13
Works	Horace	1st century BCE	13
History of Rome	Livy	1st century BCE	13
Works	Ovid	1st century CE	13
Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans	Plutarch	c. 100 CE	14
Annals, Histories	Tacitus	c. 100-120 CE	15
Introduction to Arithmetic	Nicomachus	c. 100 CE	11
Discourses	Epictetus	c. 108 CE	12
Almagest	Ptolemy	c. 150 CE	16
Works	Lucian	2nd century CE	12
Meditations	Marcus Aurelius	c. 170-180 CE	12
On the Natural Faculties	Galen	c. 170 CE	10
The New Testament	Various	1st-2nd century CE	20
The Enneads	Plotinus	c. 250 CE	17
Summa Theologica	St. Thomas Aquinas	1265-1274	19, 20
Divine Comedy	Dante Alighieri	1320	21
Troilus and Criseyde, Canterbury Tales	Geoffrey Chaucer	c. 1400	22
Notebooks	Leonardo da Vinci	c. 1500	23
The Prince	Niccolò Machiavelli	1532	23
Praise of Folly	Desiderius Erasmus	1511	23
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres	Nicolaus Copernicus	1543	16
Utopia	Sir Thomas More	1516	23
Three Treatises, Table Talk	Martin Luther	1520-1570	23
Gargantua and Pantagruel	François Rabelais	1532-1564	24
Institutes of the Christian Religion	John Calvin	1536	23
Essays	Michel de Montaigne	1580-1595	25
On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies	William Gilbert	1600	28
Don Quixote	Miguel de Cervantes	1605 (Part I), 1615 (Part II)	27
Prothalamion, The Faerie Queene	Edmund Spenser	1590-1596	26
Essays, Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum, New Atlantis	Francis Bacon	1597-1627	28
Complete Works	William Shakespeare	1590-1613	26, 27
Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences	Galileo Galilei	1638	28
Epitome of Copernican Astronomy, Concerning the Harmonies of the World	Johannes Kepler	1618-1621	16
On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, On the Circulation of Blood, On the Generation of Animals	William Harvey	1628-1651	28
Leviathan	Thomas Hobbes	1651	23
Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Discourse on the Method, Geometry, Meditations on First Philosophy	René Descartes	1628-1641	31
Works	John Milton	1632-1674	32
Complete Works	Molière	1622-1673	26
The Provincial Letters, Pensées, Scientific Treatises	Blaise Pascal	1657-1670	33
Treatise on Light	Christiaan Huygens	1690	34
Ethics	Benedict de Spinoza	1677	31
Letter Concerning Toleration, Of Civil Government, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Thoughts Concerning Education	John Locke	1689-1693	35
Complete Works	Jean Baptiste Racine	1664-1691	26
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Optics	Isaac Newton	1687, 1704	34
Discourse on Metaphysics, New Essays Concerning Human Understanding, Monadology	Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz	1686-1714	35
Robinson Crusoe	Daniel Defoe	1719	36
A Tale of a Tub, Journal to Stella, Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal	Jonathan Swift	1704-1729	36
The Way of the World	William Congreve	1700	36
Principles of Human Knowledge	George Berkeley	1710	35
Essay on Criticism, Rape of the Lock, Essay on Man	Alexander Pope	1711-1733	40
Persian Letters, Spirit of the Laws	Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu	1721, 1748	38
Letters on the English, Candide, Philosophical Dictionary	Voltaire	1733-1764	34
Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones	Henry Fielding	1742, 1749	37
The Vanity of Human Wishes, Dictionary, Rasselas, The Lives of the Poets	Samuel Johnson	1749-1781	37
Treatise on Human Nature, Essays Moral and Political, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding	David Hume	1739-1748	35
On the Origin of Inequality, On the Political Economy, Emile, The Social Contract	Jean-Jacques Rousseau	1755-1762	38
Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy	Laurence Sterne	1760-1768	36
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations	Adam Smith	1759, 1776	39
Critique of Pure Reason, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, Critique of Practical Reason, The Science of Right, Critique of Judgment, Perpetual Peace	Immanuel Kant	1781-1795	42
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Autobiography	Edward Gibbon	1776-1788	40, 41
Journal, Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.	James Boswell	1791	41
Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)	Antoine Laurent Lavoisier	1789	45
Federalist Papers	Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison	1787-1788	43
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Theory of Fictions	Jeremy Bentham	1789, 1932	45
Faust, Poetry and Truth	Johann Wolfgang von Goethe	1808-1832	47
Analytical Theory of Heat	Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier	1822	45
Phenomenology of Spirit, Philosophy of Right, Lectures on the Philosophy of History	Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel	1807-1820	46
Poems	William Wordsworth	1787-1850	41
Poems	Samuel Taylor Coleridge	1798-1834	41
Pride and Prejudice, Emma	Jane Austen	1813, 1815	46
On War	Carl von Clausewitz	1832	42
The Red and the Black, The Charterhouse of Parma, On Love	Stendhal	1830-1839	46
Don Juan	Lord Byron	1819-1824	41
Studies in Pessimism	Arthur Schopenhauer	1851	46
Chemical History of a Candle, Experimental Researches in Electricity	Michael Faraday	1861, 1839-1855	45
Principles of Geology	Charles Lyell	1830-1833	49
The Positive Philosophy	Auguste Comte	1830-1842	45
Père Goriot, Eugenie Grandet	Honoré de Balzac	1835, 1833	46
Representative Men, Essays, Journal	Ralph Waldo Emerson	1850, 1841-1844, 1909-1914	46
The Scarlet Letter	Nathaniel Hawthorne	1850	48
Democracy in America	Alexis de Tocqueville	1835-1840	44
A System of Logic, On Liberty, Representative Government, Utilitarianism, The Subjection of Women, Autobiography	John Stuart Mill	1843-1873	43
The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, Autobiography	Charles Darwin	1859, 1871, 1887	49
Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Hard Times	Charles Dickens	1837, 1850, 1854	47
Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine	Claude Bernard	1865	45
Civil Disobedience, Walden	Henry David Thoreau	1849, 1854	48
Capital, Communist Manifesto	Karl Marx	1867-1894, 1848	50
Adam Bede, Middlemarch	George Eliot	1859, 1871-1872	46
Moby-Dick, Billy Budd	Herman Melville	1851, 1924	48
Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov	Fyodor Dostoevsky	1866, 1869, 1880	52
Madame Bovary, Three Stories	Gustave Flaubert	1857, 1877	46
Plays	Henrik Ibsen	1879-1899	52
War and Peace, Anna Karenina, What is Art?, Twenty-Three Tales	Leo Tolstoy	1869, 1877, 1897, 1906	51
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Mysterious Stranger	Mark Twain	1884, 1916	48
The Principles of Psychology, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism, Essays in Radical Empiricism	William James	1890, 1902, 1907, 1912	53
The American, The Ambassadors	Henry James	1877, 1903	48
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, The Will to Power	Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche	1883-1885, 1886, 1887, 1901	43
Science and Hypothesis, Science and Method	Jules Henri Poincaré	1902, 1908	56
The Interpretation of Dreams, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Civilization and Its Discontents, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis	Sigmund Freud	1900, 1916-1917, 1930, 1933	54
Plays and Prefaces	George Bernard Shaw	1898-1950	47
Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory, Where Is Science Going?, Scientific Autobiography	Max Planck	1922, 1932, 1949	56
Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion	Henri Bergson	1889, 1896, 1907, 1932	55
How We Think, Democracy and Education, Experience and Nature, Logic: the Theory of Inquiry	John Dewey	1910, 1916, 1925, 1938	55
An Introduction to Mathematics, Science and the Modern World, The Aims of Education and Other Essays, Adventures of Ideas	Alfred North Whitehead	1911, 1925, 1929, 1933	56
The Life of Reason, Skepticism and Animal Faith, Persons and Places	George Santayana	1905-1906, 1923, 1944-1953	55
The State and Revolution	Vladimir Lenin	1917	54
Remembrance of Things Past	Marcel Proust	1913-1927	54
The Problems of Philosophy, The Analysis of Mind, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits	Bertrand Russell	1912, 1921, 1940, 1948	55
The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers	Thomas Mann	1924, 1933-1943	49
The Meaning of Relativity, On the Method of Theoretical Physics, The Evolution of Physics	Albert Einstein	1922, 1933, 1938	56
’The Dead’ in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses	James Joyce	1914, 1916, 1922	54
Art and Scholasticism, The Degrees of Knowledge, The Rights of Man and Natural Law, True Humanism	Jacques Maritain	1920, 1932, 1942, 1938	55
The Trial, The Castle	Franz Kafka	1925, 1926	54
A Study of History, Civilization on Trial	Arnold J. Toynbee	1934-1961, 1948	55
Nausea, No Exit, Being and Nothingness	Jean-Paul Sartre	1938, 1944, 1943	55
The First Circle, Cancer Ward	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn	1968, 1968	54

Reading Plans

• My Plans
  • GB Volume 4 - Reading Plan
  • GB Volume 5 - Reading Plan
• https://westerntradition.wordpress.com/great-books-project/
• These reading plans are not chronological though. I’m yet to find one. My reading speed will take more than 10 years to finish.

• Great Conversation - 10 year reading list

  • The links below from other sites are same as the “Great Conversation list” but have links to reviews/notes/videos on select books)

  • https://gbwwblog.wordpress.com/reading-plan/

  • https://fredrikvladimircoulter.com/the-great-books-of-the-western-world/ten-year-reading-plan/

  • https://thinkingwest.com/10-year-reading-plan/

• https://westerntradition.wordpress.com/great-books-project/ (This says the Great Conversation - 10 year list (The link above) will not take you through the entire series. It is more of a “highlights” list.)