# Western Culture
## Overview
### Literature

* Selected list of the Great Books in chronological order. (Related Western canon)
* Homer – Iliad; Odyssey
* The Old Testament
* Aeschylus – Tragedies
* Sophocles – Tragedies
* Herodotus – Histories
* Euripides – Tragedies
* Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War
* Hippocrates – Medical Writings
* Aristophanes – Comedies
* Plato – Dialogues
* Aristotle – Works
* Epicurus – "Letter to Herodotus"; "Letter to Menoecus"
* Euclid – Elements
* Archimedes – Works
* Apollonius – Conics
* Cicero – Works (esp. Orations; On Friendship; On Old Age; Republic; Laws; Tusculan Disputations; Offices)
* Lucretius – On the Nature of Things
* Virgil – Works (esp. Aeneid)
* Horace – Works (esp. Odes and Epodes; The Art of Poetry)
* Livy – History of Rome
* Ovid – Works (esp. Metamorphoses)
* Quintilian – Institutes of Oratory
* Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia
* Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola; Germania; Dialogus de oratoribus (Dialogue on Oratory)
* Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic
* Epictetus – Discourses; Enchiridion
* Ptolemy – Almagest
* Lucian – Works (esp. The Way to Write History; The True History; The Sale of Creeds; Alexander the Oracle Monger; Charon; The Sale of Lives; The Fisherman; Dialogue of the Gods; Dialogues of the Sea-Gods; Dialogues of the Dead)
* Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
* Galen – On the Natural Faculties
* The New Testament
* Plotinus – The Enneads
* St. Augustine – "On the Teacher"; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
* The Volsungs Saga or Nibelungenlied
* The Song of Roland
* The Saga of Burnt Njál
* Maimonides – The Guide for the Perplexed
* St. Thomas Aquinas – Of Being and Essence; Summa Contra Gentiles; Of the Governance of Rulers; Summa Theologica
* Dante Alighieri – The New Life (La Vita Nuova); "On Monarchy"; Divine Comedy
* Giovanni Boccaccio - The Decameron
* Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
* Thomas à Kempis – The Imitation of Christ
* Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks
* Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
* Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly; Colloquies
* Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
* Thomas More – Utopia
* Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises
* François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel
* John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion
* Michel de Montaigne – Essays
* William Gilbert – On the Lodestone and Magnetic Bodies
* Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote
* Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
* Francis Bacon – Essays; The Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum; New Atlantis
* William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays
* Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Two New Sciences
* Johannes Kepler – The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Harmonices Mundi
* William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; Generation of Animals
* Grotius – The Law of War and Peace
* Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan; Elements of Philosophy
* René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy; Principles of Philosophy; The Passions of the Soul
* Corneille – Tragedies (esp. The Cid, Cinna)
* John Milton – Works (esp. the minor poems; Areopagitica; Paradise Lost; Samson Agonistes)
* Molière – Comedies (esp. The Miser; The School for Wives; The Misanthrope; The Doctor in Spite of Himself; Tartuffe; The Tradesman Turned Gentleman; The Imaginary Invalid; The Affected Ladies)
* Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensées; Scientific Treatises
* John Bunyan - The Pilgrim's Progress
* Boyle – The Sceptical Chymist
* Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light
* Benedict de Spinoza – Political Treatises; Ethics
* John Locke – A Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Some Thoughts Concerning Education
* Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies (esp. Andromache; Phaedra; Athalie (Athaliah))
* Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Opticks
* Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays on Human Understanding; Monadology
* Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe; Moll Flanders
* Jonathan Swift – The Battle of the Books; A Tale of a Tub; A Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
* William Congreve – The Way of the World
* George Berkeley – A New Theory of Vision; A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
* Alexander Pope – An Essay on Criticism; The Rape of the Lock; An Essay on Man
* Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; The Spirit of the Laws
* Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
* Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
* Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; Lives of the Poets
* David Hume – A Treatise of Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; History of England
* Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Discourse on Inequality; On Political Economy; Emile: or, On Education; The Social Contract; Confessions
* Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
* Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
* William Blackstone – Commentaries on the Laws of England
* Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
* Edward Gibbon – The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
* James Boswell – Journal; The Life of Samuel Johnson
* Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
* Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers (together with the Articles of Confederation; United States Constitution and United States Declaration of Independence)
* Jeremy Bentham – Comment on the Commentaries; Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
* Johann Wolfgang Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth
* Thomas Robert Malthus – An Essay on the Principle of Population
* John Dalton – A New System of Chemical Philosophy
* Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat
* Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – The Phenomenology of Spirit; Science of Logic; Elements of the Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
* William Wordsworth – Poems (esp. Lyrical Ballads; Lucy poems; sonnets; The Prelude)
* Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems (esp. Kubla Khan; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ); Biographia Literaria
* David Ricardo – On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
* Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma
* Carl von Clausewitz – On War
* Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
* François Guizot – History of Civilization in France
* Lord Byron – Don Juan
* Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism
* Michael Faraday – The Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
* Nikolai Lobachevsky – Geometrical Researches on the Theory of Parallels
* Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology
* Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy
* Honoré Balzac – Works (esp. Le Père Goriot; Le Cousin Pons; Eugénie Grandet; Cousin Bette; César Birotteau)
* Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal
* Victor Hugo - Les Misérables
* Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter
* Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America
* John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; Principles of Political Economy; On Liberty; Considerations on Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
* Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
* William Makepeace Thackeray – Works (esp. Vanity Fair; The History of Henry Esmond; The Virginians; Pendennis)
* Charles Dickens – Works (esp. Pickwick Papers; Our Mutual Friend; David Copperfield; Dombey and Son; Oliver Twist; A Tale of Two Cities; Hard Times)
* Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
* George Boole – The Laws of Thought
* Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden
* Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – Das Kapital (Capital); The Communist Manifesto
* George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch
* Herman Melville – Typee; Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
* Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
* Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories
* Henry Thomas Buckle – A History of Civilization in England
* Francis Galton – Inquiries into Human Faculties and Its Development
* Bernhard Riemann – The Hypotheses of Geometry
* Henrik Ibsen – Plays (esp. Peer Gynt; Brand; Hedda Gabler; Emperor and Galilean; A Doll's House; The Wild Duck; The Master Builder)
* Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; "What Is Art?"; Twenty-Three Tales
* Richard Dedekind – Theory of Numbers
* Wilhelm Wundt – Physiological Psychology; Outline of Psychology
* Mark Twain – The Innocents Abroad; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; The Mysterious Stranger
* Henry Adams – History of the United States; Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres; The Education of Henry Adams; Degradation of Democratic Dogma
* Charles Peirce – Chance, Love, and Logic; Collected Papers
* William Sumner – Folkways
* Oliver Wendell Holmes – The Common Law; Collected Legal Papers
* William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; A Pluralistic Universe; Essays in Radical Empiricism
* Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors
* Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morality; The Will to Power; Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist
* Georg Cantor – Transfinite Numbers
* Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method; The Foundations of Science
* Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; Introduction to Psychoanalysis; Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; The Ego and the Id; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
* George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces
* Max Planck – Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
* Henri Bergson – Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
* John Dewey – How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; The Quest for Certainty; Logic – The Theory of Inquiry
* Alfred North Whitehead – A Treatise on Universal Algebra; An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; Process and Reality; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
* George Santayana – The Life of Reason; Scepticism and Animal Faith; The Realms of Being (which discusses the Realms of Essence, Matter and Truth); Persons and Places
* Vladimir Lenin – Imperialism; The State and Revolution
* Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time (formerly translated as Remembrance of Things Past)
* Bertrand Russell – Principles of Mathematics; The Problems of Philosophy; Principia Mathematica; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits
* Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
* Albert Einstein – The Theory of Relativity; Sidelights on Relativity; The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
* James Joyce – "The Dead" in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
* Jacques Maritain – Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; Freedom and the Modern World; A Preface to Metaphysics; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism
* Franz Kafka – The Trial; The Castle
* Arnold J. Toynbee – A Study of History; Civilization on Trial
* Jean-Paul Sartre – Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
* Ivan Pavlov – Conditioned Reflexes
* Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – The First Circle; Cancer Ward