Core Curriculum texts

Most Core Curriculum texts are available free of charge on the interweb. See the Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization pages for links to online versions.

Free Culture at Columbia, a student group, has also compiled the core texts and distributed the package on USB drives. The package also can be downloaded here. The group has many links to texts on this page.

Contemporary Civilization

First semester

• The Republic by Plato
• Politics by Aristotle
• Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
• Book of Exodus in the Bible
• City of God by Saint Augustine
• The Holy Qu'ran
• The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
• The Discourses by Niccolo Machiavelli
• The Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
• Second Treatise of Government by John Locke

Second semester

• An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals by David Hume
• Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant
• Discourse on the Origins of Inequality by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
• The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
• On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche