A Reading List From GPT-4

Attempted Thoughts -

Copied and pasted the prompts and responses directly below. It's pretty interesting. The italics are my prompts. The rest are responses straight from GPT-4. This alone was kind of worth the USD20 subscription (lol).

Please give me a comprehensive reading list or outline of a curriculum for a classical-style education. I want to learn about how the world works, core foundational ideas in both western and eastern thought, focus on political philosophy, and capital. Please add material to account for any gaps in knowledge. The goal is to understand foundational and useful ideas to navigate times of change, be nimble in thought, and be able to construct useful solutions. For context, I am a final year philosophy, politics, and economics undergraduate. As such, I am familiar with certain knowledge associated with my education and am willing to read difficult texts. Please be as comprehensive with the reading list and make it as long as necessary. Please also consider the sequence of texts in relation to the broader progress of learning.

Given your background as a final year Philosophy, Politics, and Economics undergraduate, you're already familiar with some key concepts in these areas. Here's a comprehensive reading list that builds on your foundation and covers classical-style education, political philosophy, and capital, along with other foundational ideas in both Western and Eastern thought. The list is organized into categories, and within each category, texts are sequenced to optimize learning.

I. Ancient Western Philosophy

  1. Plato's Dialogues
  • The Republic
  • The Symposium
  • The Apology
  • The Phaedo
  • The Meno
  • The Gorgias
  1. Aristotle's Works
  • Nicomachean Ethics
  • Politics
  • Metaphysics
  • Rhetoric
  • Poetics

II. Ancient Eastern Philosophy

  1. Confucius' Analects
  2. Laozi's Tao Te Ching
  3. The I Ching
  4. The Bhagavad Gita
  5. The Upanishads
  6. The Dhammapada

III. Medieval Philosophy

  1. St. Augustine's Confessions and City of God
  2. Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy
  3. St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica
  4. Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed
  5. Al-Farabi's On the Perfect State

IV. Early Modern Philosophy

  1. Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince
  2. Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan
  3. John Locke's Two Treatises of Government
  4. Baruch Spinoza's Ethics
  5. Gottfried Leibniz's Monadology

V. The Enlightenment

  1. David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature
  2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract
  3. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
  4. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations
  5. Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws

VI. 19th-Century Philosophy

  1. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
  2. Karl Marx's Capital, The Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels), and The German Ideology (with Friedrich Engels)
  3. John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and Utilitarianism
  4. Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil
  5. Søren Kierkegaard's Either/Or and Fear and Trembling

VII. 20th-Century and Contemporary Philosophy

  1. Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations
  2. Martin Heidegger's Being and Time
  3. Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness
  4. Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism
  5. John Rawls' A Theory of Justice
  6. Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality
  7. Jürgen Habermas' The Theory of Communicative Action
  8. Martha Nussbaum's The Fragility of Goodness
  9. Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue
  10. Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom
  11. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century
  12. Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia
  13. Isaiah Berlin's The Hedgehog and the Fox

VIII. Science, Technology, and the Environment

  1. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species

Please continue the reading list and curriculum from where it was left off in the previous response, thank you.

Certainly! Here's the continuation of the reading list from where we left off.

VIII. Science, Technology, and the Environment (Continued)

  1. Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
  2. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring
  3. James Lovelock's Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth
  4. Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics
  5. Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
  6. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
  7. Bill McKibben's The End of Nature
  8. E. O. Wilson's Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
  9. Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

IX. Sociology and Anthropology

  1. Émile Durkheim's The Division of Labor in Society and Suicide
  2. Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Economy and Society
  3. Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia
  4. Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures
  5. Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
  6. Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
  7. Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life
  8. Arlie Russell Hochschild's The Managed Heart

X. Psychology

  1. Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams and Civilization and Its Discontents
  2. Carl Jung's The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious
  3. B.F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity
  4. Carl Rogers' On Becoming a Person
  5. Abraham Maslow's Toward a Psychology of Being
  6. Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow
  7. Carol Dweck's Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
  8. Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

XI. Feminism and Gender Studies

  1. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex
  2. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique
  3. bell hooks' Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
  4. Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
  5. Kimberlé Crenshaw's "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color"
  6. Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
  7. Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution
  8. Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century"

XII. Critical Race Theory and Postcolonial Studies

  1. Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth
  2. W.E.B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk
  3. Edward Said's Orientalism
  4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
  5. Homi K. Bhabha's The Location of Culture
  6. Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
  7. Kimberlé Crenshaw's "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics"
  8. Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me

XIII. Literature

Please continue the reading list, thank you.

Certainly! Here's the continuation of the reading list, picking up from where we left off.

XIII. Literature (Continued)

  1. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey
  2. Virgil's Aeneid
  3. Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy
  4. Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales
  5. William Shakespeare's plays (Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest)
  6. Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote
  7. John Milton's Paradise Lost
  8. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Emma
  9. Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Notes from Underground
  10. Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina
  11. George Eliot's Middlemarch
  12. James Joyce's Ulysses and Dubliners
  13. Franz Kafka's The Trial and The Metamorphosis
  14. Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway
  15. Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time
  16. Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude
  17. Toni Morrison's Beloved and Song of Solomon
  18. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children
  19. Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

XIV. Art and Aesthetics

  1. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment
  2. Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation
  3. Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy
  4. Clive Bell's Art
  5. R.G. Collingwood's The Principles of Art
  6. Clement Greenberg's "Modernist Painting" and "Avant-Garde and Kitsch"
  7. Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida and Mythologies
  8. Susan Sontag's On Photography and Against Interpretation

XV. Education and the Philosophy of Education

  1. John Dewey's Democracy and Education
  2. Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed
  3. Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society
  4. Neil Postman's The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School
  5. bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
  6. Maria Montessori's The Montessori Method
  7. John Holt's How Children Learn

This comprehensive reading list should provide you with a solid foundation across various disciplines and help you navigate times of change, be nimble in thought, and construct useful solutions. Keep in mind that learning is an ongoing process, and you can always expand your knowledge by exploring new areas or engaging in debates and discussions with others. Happy reading!

Thank you, can you please add some sections covering capital, development economics, political development, and the future of work and automation? Thank you.

Of course! Here are additional sections covering capital, development economics, political development, and the future of work and automation.

XVI. Capital and Finance

  1. David Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
  2. Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom
  3. Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
  4. Hyman Minsky's Stabilizing an Unstable Economy
  5. John Maynard Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
  6. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century and The Economics of Inequality
  7. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

XVII. Development Economics

  1. Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom
  2. Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson's Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
  3. Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
  4. Esther Duflo and Abhijit V. Banerjee's Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
  5. William Easterly's The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
  6. Jeffrey Sachs' The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
  7. Hernando De Soto's The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else

XVIII. Political Development

  1. Samuel P. Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies and The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
  2. Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man and Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
  3. Robert D. Putnam's Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy and Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
  4. Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China
  5. Charles Tilly's Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992
  6. Dani Rodrik's The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy
  7. Carles Boix's Democracy and Redistribution

XIX. The Future of Work and Automation

  1. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee's The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
  2. Martin Ford's The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
  3. David Autor's "Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation"
  4. Ryan Avent's The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-first Century
  5. Carl Frey's The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
  6. Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
  7. Andrew Yang's The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

These additional sections should complement the previous reading list and provide you with a comprehensive understanding of capital, development economics, political development, and the future of work and automation. Enjoy your reading journey!