Happiness and the good life 6 rungs
What it means for a whole life to go well.
Great Books LadderIndex
Great Ideas: our index
Pick an idea and follow it through the great books, rung by rung, from the oldest to the newest.
This index is inspired by Mortimer J. Adler's Syntopicon, the index of great ideas in volumes 1 and 2 of Great Books of the Western World, which lists passage by passage where each idea is discussed. Ours is far smaller and our own: 60 ideas, named and grouped our way, each linking to the rungs on this ladder that take it up. It grows as rungs are built. To learn how the Syntopicon itself works, see The Syntopicon and Mortimer Adler.
- Living well
- Living together
- Knowing and thinking
- Nature and science
- God and the soul
- Stories, art and words
Living well
How a person should live: what makes a life good, and what it asks of us.
Virtue and character 21 rungs
The habits that make a person good, self-control among them, and how they are formed.
- Plato: Meno (being written)
- Plato: Protagoras and Gorgias (being written)
- Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics (being written)
- Plutarch: Lives of the Greeks (being written)
- Plutarch: Lives of the Romans (being written)
- Epictetus: Discourses (being written)
- Marcus Aurelius: Meditations (being written)
- Aquinas: Happiness, Virtue and Law (being written)
- Aquinas: Faith, Hope and Love (being written)
- Dante: Purgatorio (being written)
- Machiavelli: The Prince (being written)
- Racine: Berenice and Phaedra (being written)
- Diderot: Rameau's Nephew (being written)
- Boswell: The Life of Samuel Johnson (being written)
- Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil (being written)
- William James: The Principles of Psychology (being written)
- Jane Austen: Emma (being written)
- Dickens: Little Dorrit (being written)
- George Eliot: Middlemarch (being written)
- Mann: Death in Venice (being written)
- Cather: A Lost Lady (being written)
Friendship and love 13 rungs
Why we need friends, and the many kinds of love.
- Plato: Symposium and Phaedrus (being written)
- Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics (being written)
- Dante: Paradiso (being written)
- Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde (being written)
- Shakespeare: The Comedies (being written)
- Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet (being written)
- Shakespeare: Othello (being written)
- Shakespeare: The Sonnets (being written)
- Cervantes: Don Quixote, Part Two (being written)
- Boswell: The Life of Samuel Johnson (being written)
- Jane Austen: Emma (being written)
- Henry James: The Beast in the Jungle (being written)
- Proust: Swann in Love (being written)
Courage 5 rungs
Facing danger, pain or fear for the sake of something worth it.
Duty and conscience 14 rungs, 1 ready
What we ought to do, and the inner voice that tells us.
- Sophocles: Oedipus and Antigone (being written)
- Plato: The Trial of Socrates (being written)
- Hippocrates: On Medicine
- Virgil: The Aeneid (being written)
- Marcus Aurelius: Meditations (being written)
- Shakespeare: Hamlet (being written)
- Pascal: The Provincial Letters (being written)
- Racine: Berenice and Phaedra (being written)
- Kant: The Moral Philosophy (being written)
- Mill: Utilitarianism and Representative Government (being written)
- Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling (being written)
- Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (being written)
- Tawney: The Acquisitive Society (being written)
- Chekhov: Uncle Vanya (being written)
Facing death 7 rungs, 1 ready
How the great writers thought about dying well and living in its light.
Ambition and pride 8 rungs
The drive to be great, and how it can lift a person up or bring them down.
- Homer: The Iliad (being written)
- Plutarch: Lives of the Romans (being written)
- Shakespeare: King Lear (being written)
- Shakespeare: Macbeth (being written)
- Molière: The Comedies (being written)
- Melville: Moby-Dick (being written)
- Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (being written)
- Hemingway: The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (being written)
Peace of mind 3 rungs, 1 ready
Staying calm and steady when things go wrong.
Living together
Families, cities and nations: who rules, what is fair, and what we owe each other.
Justice and fairness 7 rungs
Giving each person what is due to them, in a city and in a soul.
Laws and lawgivers 8 rungs
Where laws come from, why we obey them, and when they can be wrong.
- Aeschylus: The Oresteia (being written)
- Sophocles: Oedipus and Antigone (being written)
- Plato: Statesman, Laws and the Seventh Letter (being written)
- Aquinas: Happiness, Virtue and Law (being written)
- Kant: The Moral Philosophy (being written)
- Montesquieu: The Spirit of Laws (being written)
- The American State Papers (being written)
- Hegel: The Philosophy of Right (being written)
Freedom and its limits 21 rungs
How much a person may do as they choose, and what limits freedom fairly.
- Herodotus: The Histories (being written)
- Tacitus: The Annals and The Histories (being written)
- Epictetus: Discourses (being written)
- Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (being written)
- Spinoza: Ethics (being written)
- Milton: Paradise Lost (being written)
- Milton: Areopagitica and the Poems (being written)
- Locke: Civil Government and Toleration (being written)
- Kant: The Moral Philosophy (being written)
- Montesquieu: The Spirit of Laws (being written)
- Rousseau: The Social Contract (being written)
- Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations (being written)
- The Federalist (being written)
- Hegel: The Philosophy of Right (being written)
- Hegel: The Philosophy of History (being written)
- Mill: On Liberty (being written)
- Tocqueville: Democracy in America (being written)
- Ibsen: The Plays (being written)
- Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov (being written)
- Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (being written)
- Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (being written)
Equality 4 rungs
In what ways people are equal, and what follows from it.
Power and rulers 17 rungs
How rulers gain power and keep it, and what makes power legitimate.
- Aristophanes: The Comedies (being written)
- Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War (being written)
- Plutarch: Lives of the Greeks (being written)
- Plutarch: Lives of the Romans (being written)
- Tacitus: The Annals and The Histories (being written)
- Machiavelli: The Prince (being written)
- Shakespeare: The History Plays (being written)
- Shakespeare: Julius Caesar and the Roman Plays (being written)
- Shakespeare: Macbeth (being written)
- Hobbes: Leviathan (being written)
- The Federalist (being written)
- Gibbon: The Decline and Fall, I (being written)
- Weber: Essays in Sociology (being written)
- Conrad: Heart of Darkness (being written)
- Shaw: Saint Joan (being written)
- D. H. Lawrence: The Prussian Officer (being written)
- Orwell: Animal Farm (being written)
Kinds of government 14 rungs
Kings, the few and the many: the forms a government can take.
- Plato: The Republic, Books I–V (being written)
- Plato: The Republic, Books VI–X (being written)
- Plato: Statesman, Laws and the Seventh Letter (being written)
- Aristotle: Politics (being written)
- Augustine: The City of God (being written)
- Machiavelli: The Prince (being written)
- Hobbes: Leviathan (being written)
- Locke: Civil Government and Toleration (being written)
- Montesquieu: The Spirit of Laws (being written)
- Rousseau: The Social Contract (being written)
- The American State Papers (being written)
- The Federalist (being written)
- Mill: Utilitarianism and Representative Government (being written)
- Tocqueville: Democracy in America (being written)
War and its causes 10 rungs
Why nations fight, what war does to people, and how peace is kept.
- Homer: The Iliad (being written)
- Euripides: The Plays (being written)
- Herodotus: The Histories (being written)
- Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War (being written)
- Virgil: The Aeneid (being written)
- Shakespeare: The History Plays (being written)
- Gibbon: The Decline and Fall, II (being written)
- Tolstoy: War and Peace (being written)
- T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land (being written)
- Brecht: Mother Courage and Her Children (being written)
Rights and consent 4 rungs
The idea that people have rights and that government rests on their consent.
Wealth, money and markets 10 rungs
How wealth is made, traded and shared.
- Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations (being written)
- Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto (being written)
- Marx: Capital (being written)
- Balzac: Cousin Bette (being written)
- Dickens: Little Dorrit (being written)
- Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class (being written)
- Tawney: The Acquisitive Society (being written)
- Keynes: The General Theory (being written)
- Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (being written)
- Brecht: Mother Courage and Her Children (being written)
Family and home 15 rungs
Parents and children, marriage and the household.
- Homer: The Odyssey (being written)
- Aristotle: Politics (being written)
- Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet (being written)
- Shakespeare: King Lear (being written)
- Shakespeare: The Tempest and the Late Plays (being written)
- Hegel: The Philosophy of Right (being written)
- Tolstoy: War and Peace (being written)
- George Eliot: Middlemarch (being written)
- Ibsen: The Plays (being written)
- Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov (being written)
- Chekhov: Uncle Vanya (being written)
- Kafka: The Metamorphosis (being written)
- Woolf: To the Lighthouse (being written)
- O'Neill: Mourning Becomes Electra (being written)
- Brecht: Mother Courage and Her Children (being written)
How societies work 21 rungs, 1 ready
Customs, classes and institutions, studied from the outside.
- Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (being written)
- Bacon: New Atlantis
- Rousseau: The Discourses (being written)
- Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations (being written)
- Mill: On Liberty (being written)
- Tocqueville: Democracy in America (being written)
- Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto (being written)
- Marx: Capital (being written)
- Balzac: Cousin Bette (being written)
- Dickens: Little Dorrit (being written)
- George Eliot: Middlemarch (being written)
- Freud: The Later Works (being written)
- Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class (being written)
- Tawney: The Acquisitive Society (being written)
- Keynes: The General Theory (being written)
- Frazer: The Golden Bough (being written)
- Weber: Essays in Sociology (being written)
- Huizinga: The Waning of the Middle Ages (being written)
- Lévi-Strauss: Structural Anthropology (being written)
- Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (being written)
- Faulkner: A Rose for Emily (being written)
Knowing and thinking
How we know what we know, how we reason, and how we learn.
How we know anything 20 rungs, 3 ready
What knowledge is, and how it differs from guessing or belief.
- The Syntopicon and Mortimer Adler
- Plato: Phaedo (being written)
- Plato: Meno (being written)
- Plato: The Republic, Books VI–X (being written)
- Plato: Theaetetus and Sophist (being written)
- Aristotle: Logic (being written)
- Aristotle: Metaphysics (being written)
- Bacon: The Advancement of Learning (being written)
- Bacon: Novum Organum
- Descartes: Discourse on the Method
- Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy (being written)
- Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (being written)
- Berkeley: The Principles of Human Knowledge (being written)
- Kant: The Critique of Pure Reason (being written)
- Goethe: Faust (being written)
- Bergson: An Introduction to Metaphysics (being written)
- Russell: The Problems of Philosophy (being written)
- Heidegger: What Is Metaphysics? (being written)
- Bohr: Atomic Theory and the Discussion with Einstein (being written)
- Heisenberg: Physics and Philosophy (being written)
Truth 8 rungs
What it means for something to be true, and how we can tell.
- Cervantes: Don Quixote, Part Two (being written)
- Pascal: The Provincial Letters (being written)
- Mill: On Liberty (being written)
- Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil (being written)
- Ibsen: The Plays (being written)
- William James: Pragmatism (being written)
- Russell: The Problems of Philosophy (being written)
- Pirandello: Six Characters in Search of an Author (being written)
Logic and argument 8 rungs, 2 ready
Reasoning well: proofs, arguments and the mistakes to avoid.
- Plato: Protagoras and Gorgias (being written)
- Aristotle: Logic (being written)
- Aristotle: Rhetoric and Poetics (being written)
- Euclid: Elements, Books I–IV
- Euclid: Elements, Books V–X
- Aquinas: God and Creation (being written)
- Spinoza: Ethics (being written)
- Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations (being written)
The senses and experience 8 rungs
What we learn by seeing, hearing and touching, and what we can't.
- Plato: Theaetetus and Sophist (being written)
- Aristotle: On the Soul (being written)
- Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (being written)
- Berkeley: The Principles of Human Knowledge (being written)
- Hume: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (being written)
- William James: The Principles of Psychology (being written)
- William James: Pragmatism (being written)
- Dewey: Experience and Education (being written)
Doubt and certainty 6 rungs, 1 ready
Questioning what we think we know, and what survives the questions.
The mind 12 rungs
Thinking, feeling, memory, dreams and consciousness.
- Aristotle: On the Soul (being written)
- Augustine: Confessions (being written)
- Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy (being written)
- Spinoza: Ethics (being written)
- Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (being written)
- Kant: The Critique of Pure Reason (being written)
- William James: The Principles of Psychology (being written)
- Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams (being written)
- Freud: The Later Works (being written)
- Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations (being written)
- Proust: Swann in Love (being written)
- Woolf: To the Lighthouse (being written)
Words and meaning 12 rungs, 1 ready
How language works, and how words can clear up or cloud our thinking.
- Plato: Protagoras and Gorgias (being written)
- Plato: Theaetetus and Sophist (being written)
- Aristotle: Logic (being written)
- Aristotle: Rhetoric and Poetics (being written)
- Augustine: On Christian Doctrine (being written)
- Shakespeare: Julius Caesar and the Roman Plays (being written)
- Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (being written)
- Lavoisier: Elements of Chemistry
- Barth: The Word of God and the Word of Man (being written)
- Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations (being written)
- Lévi-Strauss: Structural Anthropology (being written)
- Orwell: Animal Farm (being written)
Teaching and learning 12 rungs, 3 ready
How people learn, and what an education is for.
- How to Read a Great Book
- The Great Conversation
- Plato: Meno (being written)
- Plato: The Republic, Books I–V (being written)
- Plato: The Republic, Books VI–X (being written)
- Nicomachus: Introduction to Arithmetic
- Augustine: On Christian Doctrine (being written)
- Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (being written)
- Montaigne: Essays (being written)
- Bacon: The Advancement of Learning (being written)
- Dewey: Experience and Education (being written)
- Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (being written)
Method: how to find things out 12 rungs, 9 ready
Step-by-step ways of reaching the truth, in science and philosophy.
- Euclid: Elements, Books I–IV
- Copernicus: On the Revolutions
- Gilbert: On the Loadstone
- Bacon: Novum Organum
- Descartes: Discourse on the Method
- Descartes: The Geometry
- Pascal: The Scientific Treatises
- Newton: The Principia
- Newton: Optics
- Poincaré: Science and Hypothesis (being written)
- Planck: Scientific Autobiography (being written)
- Weber: Essays in Sociology (being written)
Nature and science
The world around us, from the planets to the heartbeat, and how people found out how it works.
The heavens and the planets 10 rungs, 6 ready
The sun, moon, planets and stars, and how people worked out their motions.
- Plato: Timaeus and Critias (being written)
- Aristotle: On the Heavens
- Ptolemy: The Almagest
- Dante: Paradiso (being written)
- Copernicus: On the Revolutions
- Kepler: The Harmonies of the World
- Kepler: Epitome of Copernican Astronomy
- Newton: The Principia
- Einstein: Relativity (being written)
- Eddington: The Expanding Universe (being written)
Motion and force 8 rungs, 7 ready
Why things move, fall and orbit.
Matter, atoms and elements 9 rungs, 5 ready
What things are made of.
- Plato: Timaeus and Critias (being written)
- Aristotle: Physics
- Aristotle: On the Heavens
- Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
- Lavoisier: Elements of Chemistry
- Faraday: Experimental Researches in Electricity
- Bohr: Atomic Theory and the Discussion with Einstein (being written)
- Schrödinger: What Is Life? (being written)
- Heisenberg: Physics and Philosophy (being written)
Light and color 5 rungs, 3 ready
What light is and how we see.
Electricity and magnetism 2 rungs, 2 ready
Lodestones, sparks and the forces that run motors.
Number 6 rungs, 4 ready
Counting, primes, ratios and the patterns in numbers.
Shape, space and proof 7 rungs, 5 ready
Points, lines and figures, and proving things about them.
Measuring the world 8 rungs, 8 ready
Turning size, weight and time into numbers.
The body, health and medicine 4 rungs, 4 ready
How the body works and how healers learned to help it.
Plants and animals 10 rungs, 3 ready
Living things: their parts, their growth and their kinds.
- Aristotle: The Animals
- Virgil: Eclogues and Georgics (being written)
- Galen: On the Natural Faculties
- Harvey: On the Generation of Animals
- Kant: The Critique of Judgment (being written)
- Darwin: The Origin of Species (being written)
- Melville: Moby-Dick (being written)
- Dobzhansky: Genetics and the Origin of Species (being written)
- Schrödinger: What Is Life? (being written)
- Waddington: The Nature of Life (being written)
Evolution and the history of life 4 rungs
How living things change over long ages.
Experiment and observation 14 rungs, 13 ready
Testing ideas against the world instead of only arguing about them.
- Aristotle: The Animals
- Hippocrates: On Medicine
- Galen: On the Natural Faculties
- Gilbert: On the Loadstone
- Bacon: Novum Organum
- Bacon: New Atlantis
- Harvey: On the Motion of the Heart and Blood
- Galileo: Two New Sciences
- Harvey: On the Generation of Animals
- Pascal: The Scientific Treatises
- Newton: Optics
- Lavoisier: Elements of Chemistry
- Faraday: Experimental Researches in Electricity
- Darwin: The Origin of Species (being written)
Mathematics as nature's language 12 rungs, 8 ready
The surprising fact that numbers and shapes describe the physical world.
- Plato: Timaeus and Critias (being written)
- Archimedes: The Works
- Ptolemy: The Almagest
- Copernicus: On the Revolutions
- Kepler: The Harmonies of the World
- Kepler: Epitome of Copernican Astronomy
- Galileo: Two New Sciences
- Huygens: Treatise on Light
- Newton: The Principia
- Whitehead: Science and the Modern World (being written)
- Poincaré: Science and Hypothesis (being written)
- Whitehead: An Introduction to Mathematics (being written)
Cause and chance 8 rungs, 4 ready
Why things happen: causes, purposes and luck.
Time 11 rungs, 1 ready
What time is, and whether the world had a beginning.
- Aristotle: Physics
- Augustine: Confessions (being written)
- Shakespeare: The Sonnets (being written)
- Kant: The Critique of Pure Reason (being written)
- Bergson: An Introduction to Metaphysics (being written)
- Einstein: Relativity (being written)
- Eddington: The Expanding Universe (being written)
- Proust: Swann in Love (being written)
- Woolf: To the Lighthouse (being written)
- Faulkner: A Rose for Emily (being written)
- Beckett: Waiting for Godot (being written)
God and the soul
The deepest questions people have asked about God, the soul, good and evil, and the meaning of a life.
God 18 rungs
What the great writers argued and believed about God, each in their own words.
- Plato: Timaeus and Critias (being written)
- Aristotle: Metaphysics (being written)
- Plotinus: The Enneads (being written)
- Augustine: Confessions (being written)
- Augustine: The City of God (being written)
- Aquinas: God and Creation (being written)
- Aquinas: Faith, Hope and Love (being written)
- Dante: Paradiso (being written)
- Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion (being written)
- Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy (being written)
- Spinoza: Ethics (being written)
- Pascal: Pensées (being written)
- Milton: Paradise Lost (being written)
- Berkeley: The Principles of Human Knowledge (being written)
- Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling (being written)
- Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov (being written)
- Barth: The Word of God and the Word of Man (being written)
- Frazer: The Golden Bough (being written)
Faith and reason 12 rungs
How believing and reasoning relate: friends, rivals or partners.
- Augustine: On Christian Doctrine (being written)
- Aquinas: God and Creation (being written)
- Aquinas: Faith, Hope and Love (being written)
- Erasmus: The Praise of Folly (being written)
- Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion (being written)
- Pascal: Pensées (being written)
- Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling (being written)
- Whitehead: Science and the Modern World (being written)
- Barth: The Word of God and the Word of Man (being written)
- Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (being written)
- Shaw: Saint Joan (being written)
- T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land (being written)
The soul 6 rungs
What a soul is, and whether anything of us lasts beyond death.
Why there is evil 11 rungs
Suffering and wrongdoing, and how thinkers have tried to explain them.
- Augustine: The City of God (being written)
- Dante: Inferno (being written)
- Shakespeare: Othello (being written)
- Shakespeare: Macbeth (being written)
- Milton: Paradise Lost (being written)
- Voltaire: Candide (being written)
- Goethe: Faust (being written)
- Balzac: Cousin Bette (being written)
- Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov (being written)
- Conrad: Heart of Darkness (being written)
- D. H. Lawrence: The Prussian Officer (being written)
Wrongdoing and forgiveness 4 rungs
Guilt, mercy and starting again.
What a human being is 16 rungs
What sets people apart, and what we share with other animals.
- Euripides: The Plays (being written)
- Erasmus: The Praise of Folly (being written)
- Montaigne: Essays (being written)
- Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion (being written)
- Hobbes: Leviathan (being written)
- Pascal: Pensées (being written)
- Molière: The Comedies (being written)
- Swift: Gulliver's Travels (being written)
- Rousseau: The Discourses (being written)
- Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil (being written)
- Darwin: The Descent of Man (being written)
- Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams (being written)
- Freud: The Later Works (being written)
- Heidegger: What Is Metaphysics? (being written)
- Kafka: The Metamorphosis (being written)
- Beckett: Waiting for Godot (being written)
Stories, art and words
Heroes and journeys, laughter and tears, beauty, and the craft of telling.
Heroes 7 rungs
What makes a hero, and how heroes changed from Achilles to Huck Finn.
Journeys and homecoming 10 rungs
Leaving home, wandering and finding the way back.
- Homer: The Odyssey (being written)
- Virgil: The Aeneid (being written)
- Dante: Inferno (being written)
- Dante: Purgatorio (being written)
- Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (being written)
- Cervantes: Don Quixote, Part One (being written)
- Swift: Gulliver's Travels (being written)
- Melville: Moby-Dick (being written)
- Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (being written)
- Conrad: Heart of Darkness (being written)
Tragedy and suffering 13 rungs
Stories of great people brought low, and what they teach.
- Aeschylus: The Oresteia (being written)
- Sophocles: Oedipus and Antigone (being written)
- Euripides: The Plays (being written)
- Aristotle: Rhetoric and Poetics (being written)
- Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde (being written)
- Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet (being written)
- Shakespeare: Julius Caesar and the Roman Plays (being written)
- Shakespeare: Hamlet (being written)
- Shakespeare: Othello (being written)
- Shakespeare: King Lear (being written)
- Racine: Berenice and Phaedra (being written)
- Mann: Death in Venice (being written)
- O'Neill: Mourning Becomes Electra (being written)
Comedy and satire 14 rungs
Laughter that delights, and laughter that corrects.
- Aristophanes: The Comedies (being written)
- Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (being written)
- Erasmus: The Praise of Folly (being written)
- Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (being written)
- Shakespeare: The Comedies (being written)
- Cervantes: Don Quixote, Part One (being written)
- Cervantes: Don Quixote, Part Two (being written)
- Pascal: The Provincial Letters (being written)
- Molière: The Comedies (being written)
- Swift: Gulliver's Travels (being written)
- Voltaire: Candide (being written)
- Diderot: Rameau's Nephew (being written)
- Jane Austen: Emma (being written)
- Beckett: Waiting for Godot (being written)
Beauty and art 11 rungs, 1 ready
What beauty is, and what art is for.
- Plato: Symposium and Phaedrus (being written)
- Virgil: Eclogues and Georgics (being written)
- Plotinus: The Enneads (being written)
- Dante: Paradiso (being written)
- Shakespeare: The Tempest and the Late Plays (being written)
- Shakespeare: The Sonnets (being written)
- Kepler: The Harmonies of the World
- Kant: The Critique of Judgment (being written)
- Hardy: A Mathematician's Apology (being written)
- Huizinga: The Waning of the Middle Ages (being written)
- Mann: Death in Venice (being written)
How poetry and stories work 11 rungs
Plot, character, verse and the craft of telling.
- Aristophanes: The Comedies (being written)
- Aristotle: Rhetoric and Poetics (being written)
- Virgil: Eclogues and Georgics (being written)
- Dante: Inferno (being written)
- Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (being written)
- Shakespeare: The Comedies (being written)
- Shakespeare: The Sonnets (being written)
- Milton: Paradise Lost (being written)
- Milton: Areopagitica and the Poems (being written)
- Pirandello: Six Characters in Search of an Author (being written)
- T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land (being written)
Fate and free will 7 rungs
Whether our lives are fixed in advance or ours to choose.
- Sophocles: Oedipus and Antigone (being written)
- Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde (being written)
- Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet (being written)
- Shakespeare: Macbeth (being written)
- Melville: Moby-Dick (being written)
- Henry James: The Beast in the Jungle (being written)
- O'Neill: Mourning Becomes Electra (being written)
Telling the past 15 rungs
How historians find out what happened and why.
- Herodotus: The Histories (being written)
- Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War (being written)
- Plutarch: Lives of the Greeks (being written)
- Plutarch: Lives of the Romans (being written)
- Tacitus: The Annals and The Histories (being written)
- Augustine: The City of God (being written)
- Shakespeare: The History Plays (being written)
- Gibbon: The Decline and Fall, I (being written)
- Gibbon: The Decline and Fall, II (being written)
- Hegel: The Philosophy of History (being written)
- Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto (being written)
- Tolstoy: War and Peace (being written)
- Whitehead: Science and the Modern World (being written)
- Frazer: The Golden Bough (being written)
- Huizinga: The Waning of the Middle Ages (being written)
Progress and decline 7 rungs, 1 ready
Whether things get better over time, and why great powers fall.
Reading and books 6 rungs, 3 ready
How to read well, and why books matter.
Conversation and dialogue 7 rungs, 3 ready
Learning by talking things through with others, living and dead.