The Classic Texts Core is the heart of the Honors College. These courses are designed to immerse and engage you in the “great conversation” of our inherited tradition, encompassing philosophy, history, literature, religious studies, and the foundations of the modern social, political, and natural sciences.
Honors College Texts
HON 2123 Three Ancient Cities: Athens, Rome, Jerusalem
- Homer, “The Iliad”
- Sappho, “If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho”
- Coogan, Michael et al. (eds.), “The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version”
- Burstein, Stanley (ed.), “The Essential Greek Historians”
- Lefkowitz, Mary, and James Romm (eds.), “The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides”
- Plato, “Symposium”
- West, Thomas G., and Grace Starry West (eds.), “Four Texts on Socrates: Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates and Crito and Aristophanes’ Clouds”
- Aristotle, “The Nicomachean Ethics”
- Plautus, “Comedies”
- Virgil, “The Aeneid”
- Ovid, “Metamorphoses”
- Livy, “From the Founding of the City”
- Josephus, “The Jewish War”
- Seneca, “Moral Essays” and “Tragedies”
HON 2143 The Long Middle Ages
- Augustine, “The Confessions”
- Boethius, “The Consolation of Philosophy”
- Benedict, “The Rule of Benedict”
- Einhard, “Life of Charlemagne”
- Anonymous, “The Song of Roland”
- Tolkien, J. R. R. (trans),“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo”
- Thomas Aquinas, “Summa Theologica”
- Dante, “The Divine Comedy”
- Petrarch, “Selections”
- Martin Luther, “Selections”
HON 2223 The Birth of Modernity
- Machiavelli, Niccolò, “The Prince”
- Las Casas, Bartolomé de, “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies”
- Milton, John, “Paradise Lost”
- Shakespeare, William, “Four Tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth”
- Descartes, René, “Meditations on First Philosophy”
- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, “The Basic Political Writings”
- Locke, John, “Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration”
- Kant, Immanuel, “Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History”
- Wollstonecraft, Mary, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”
- “The Life and Works of Phillis Wheatley”
HON 2243 The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
- Tocqueville, Alexis de, “Democracy in America”
- Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, “Crime and Punishment”
- Mill, John Stuart, “On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Other Essays”
- Nietzsche, Friedrich, “On the Genealogy of Morals”
- Wilde, Oscar, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”
- Freud, Sigmund, “Civilization and its Discontents”
- Woolf, Virginia, “A Room of One’s Own”
- Hurston, Zora Neale, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”
- Arendt, Hannah, “The Portable Arendt”
- Shelley, Mary, “Frankenstein: The 1818 Text”
- Joyce, James, “Dubliners”
- Marx, Karl, “Selections”
- Douglass, Frederick, “Selections”
- Whitman, Walt, “Selections”