99 Reasons to Check Out the Great Books of the Western World

This is the exhaustive canon of Western culture, science, and philosophy. And these 99 reasons just scratch the surface of this library, which contains 517 works by 130 authors in its 60 volumes.

  1. The City of God
  2. The Aeneid
  3. The Divine Comedy
  4. The Federalist Papers
  5. Plato’s Dialogues
  6. The Summa Theologica
  7. The Canterbury Tales
  8. The Prince
  9. The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha
  10. Pascal’s Pensées
  11. Gulliver’s Travels
  12. The Critique of Pure Reason
  13. The Critique of Practical Reason
  14. The Critique of Judgment
  15. Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil
  16. The Origin of Species
  17. The Communist Manifesto
  18. War and Peace
  19. Heidegger’s What Is Metaphysics?
  20. The Word of God and the Word of Man
  21. Einstein’s Relativity: The Special and the General Theory
  22. Heart of Darkness
  23. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis
  24. The Wealth of Nations
  25. The Articles of Confederation
  26. The Philosophy of Right
  27. The Philosophy of History
  28. Democracy in America
  29. Moby Dick
  30. William James’ The Principles of Psychology
  31. Freud’s The Ego and the Id
  32. The Interpretation of Dreams
  33. Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy
  34. Bergson’s An Introduction to Metaphysics
  35. The Great Gatsby
  36. The Waste Land
  37. Animal Farm
  38. Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class
  39. Selections from Weber’s Essays in Sociology
  40. Waddington’s The Nature of Life
  41. Selections from Neils Bohr’s Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature
  42. Schrödinger’s What Is Life?
  43. Tawney’s The Acquisitive Society
  44. The Brothers Karamazov
  45. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  46. The Descent of Man
  47. Augustine’s Confessions
  48. Plotinus’ The Six Enneads
  49. Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations
  50. Epictetus’ Discourses
  51. Lucretius’ The Way Things Are
  52. Herodotus’ The History
  53. Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian War
  1. The Illiad
  2. The Odyssey
  3. Prometheus Bound
  4. Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion
  5. The Leviathan
  6. Michel de Montaigne’s Essays
  7. Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets
  8. Concerning the Two New Sciences
  9. Spinoza’s Ethics
  10. Pascal’s Scientific Treatises
  11. Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning
  12. Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
  13. Huygen’s Treatise on Light
  14. N. Whitehead’s An Introduction to Mathematics
  15. David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
  16. Berkeley’s The Principles of Human Knowledge
  17. Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
  18. Candide
  19. Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws
  20. Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Galileo Galilei’s Empire (2 vols.)
  21. Euclid’s Elements
  22. Hippocratic Writings
  23. The Works of Archimedes
  24. Plutarch’s The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
  25. Ptolemy’s The Almagest
  26. Kepler’s Epitome of Copernican Astronomy
  27. Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
  28. Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde
  29. Erasmus’ Praise of Folly
  30. Paradise Lost
  31. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis
  32. Plato’s The Seventh Letter
  33. Aristotle’s Categories
  34. Physics
  35. On Dreams
  36. Nicomachean Ethics
  37. Rhetoric
  38. On Poetics
  39. Metaphysics
  40. On the Soul
  41. On Memory and Reminiscence
  42. Descartes’ Rules for the Direction of the Mind
  43. Pascal’s Provincial Letters
  44. Moliere’s Don Juan
  45. The Social Contract
  46. The Syntopicon

Check out the whole collection!

Great Books 3The Syntopicon may just be the best reason to get this collection, worth $99.99 in and of itself in my opinion. What is the Syntopicon? The Syntopicon is a curated collection of 102 topics and themes that saturate all of the works in this library. These topics include God, love, education, evolution, necessity and contingency, memory and imagination, citizenship, language, and 94 others. See for yourself—check out the sample pages for the topic of “Infinity” (if you don’t want to read the introduction, skip to page 11 to see what this will do for your library and research):

Imagine those last five pages in your Logos digital library, with active links that open to those very pages. That’s the power of Logos working to bring the conversation of classical literature and thought to the top of your research.
Get it now! 

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Logos Staff

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