Enduring Texts: Justice

Aristotle was a student of Plato's and, as such, was influenced by the kinds of questions his teacher was exploring. Aristotle's mature approach was quite different than Plato's, however, in that he focused on the empirical aspects of the world around him. This emphasis on the empirical has sometimes led scholars to refer to Aristotle as the first scientist in the Western tradition, though he still has much to say about the traditional questions in philosophy pertaining to knowledge, justice, human well being, and so on.

Primary Discipline: Philosophy
Secondary Discipline(s): Political Science, Psychology, English, Rhetoric

List of available resources in Coulter Library's Physical Collection.

The Bible is the most important book in the history of Western civilization, and also the most difficult to interpret. It has been the vehicle of continual conflict, with every interpretation reflecting passionately-held views that have affected not merely religion, but politics, art, and even science. This unique edition offers an exciting new approach to the most influential of all English biblical texts - the Authorized King James Version, complete with the Apocrypha. Its wide-ranging Introduction and the substantial notes to each book of the Bible guide the reader through the labyrinth of literary, textual, and theological issues, using the most up-to-date scholarship to demonstrate how and why the Bible has affected the literature, art and general culture of the English-speaking world.

Primary Discipline: Religion
Secondary Discipline(s): Literature, Philosophy, History

The main topic in the Meno is the nature of virtue and whether it can be taught to others. Plato does not provide a definite answer to these questions - this is typical for a dialogue involving Socrates - though we do get an early version of Plato's theory of forms. The Meno also explores the idea of innate knowledge (Plato's famous theory of recollection) and argues that mathematical knowledge qualifies as innate.

Primary Discipline: Philosophy
Secondary Discipline(s): Mathematics

Plato is one of the giants of Western Philosophy. Most of his writings are in dialog form, with Socrates as the central character. As well as illustrating the Socratic approach to teaching - what has come to be known as the Socratic Method - Plato's dialogues set the terms of debate for many of the central issues in philosophy: the nature of justice, the concepts of truth and knowledge, what it means to live a good life, and so on.

Primary Discipline: Philosophy
Secondary Discipline(s): Political Science, Psychology

List of available resources in Coulter Library's Physical Collection.

A treatise on political theory that discusses various forms of government, their strengths and weaknesses, the role of the citizen in the state, the importance of education, and the relationship between ethics and politics, ultimately arguing for a balanced form of government that combines elements of democracy and aristocracy, and emphasizing the importance of the common good.

Primary Discipline: Philosophy
Secondary Discipline(s): Political Science, Psychology

Qurʾān, (Arabic: “Recitation”) also spelled Quran and Koran, the sacred scripture of Islam. According to conventional Islamic belief, the Qurʾān was revealed by the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad in the West Arabian towns Mecca and Medina beginning in 610 and ending with Muhammad’s death in 632 ce.

Primary Discipline: Religion
Secondary Discipline(s): Philosophy, Literature, History
Non-Western Text

Plato's main concern in The Republic is the nature of justice and the just society. Through the main character of Socrates the reader is brought on a tour of any and all dimensions of the concept of justice, and along the way we see Socrates taking a deep dive into other areas of ethics, as well as into metaphyscis and epistemology. A hugely influential text in the Western philosophical tradition.

Primary Discipline: Philosophy
Secondary Discipline(s): Political Science,

St. Augustine's Confessions is sometimes said to be the first autobiography. In the text we see Augustine in mid-life carefully and honestly relating the story of his life to that point - from the varied sins of his youth, through his conversion to Christianity, to some profund meditations on the nature of time and memory. Throughout, Augustine is directly addressing God and is primarily concerned with the well-being of his soul, i.e. his essence, and questions about the will and the intellect.

Primary Discipline: Philosophy
Secondary Discipline(s): Religion

April, 1984. Winston Smith, thinks a thought, starts a diary, and falls in love. But Big Brother is watching him, and the door to Room 101 can swing open in the blink of an eye. Its ideas have become our ideas, and Orwell's fiction is often said to be our reality. The definitive book of the 20th century is re-examined in a radical new adaptation exploring why Orwell's vision of the future is as relevant as ever.

Primary Discipline: Literature
Secondary Discipline(s): Political Science, Political Philosophy

Anne Frank, in full Annelies Marie Frank, (born June 12, 1929, Frankfurt am Main, Germany—died February/March 1945, Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, near Hannover), Jewish girl whose diary of her family’s two years in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands became a classic of war literature.

Primary Discipline: Autobiography
Secondary Discipline(s): History, Holocaust Studies, Jewish Studies

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At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document from the iconic author of If Beale Street Could Talk and Go Tell It on the Mountain. It consists of two "" letters,"" written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism."

Primary Discipline: African American History

In Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963, King’s campaign to end segregation at lunch counters and in hiring practices drew nationwide attention when police turned dogs and fire hoses on the demonstrators. King was jailed along with large numbers of his supporters, including hundreds of schoolchildren. His supporters did not, however, include all the Black clergy of Birmingham, and he was strongly opposed by some of the white clergy who had issued a statement urging African Americans not to support the demonstrations. From the Birmingham jail, King wrote a letter of great eloquence in which he spelled out his philosophy of nonviolence.

Primary Discipline: American History

Malcolm X, original name Malcolm Little, Muslim name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, (born May 19, 1925, Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.—died February 21, 1965, New York, New York), African American leader and prominent figure in the Nation of Islam who articulated concepts of race pride and Black nationalism in the early 1960s. After his assassination, the widespread distribution of his life story—The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)—made him an ideological hero, especially among Black youth.

Primary Discipline: Autobiography
Secondary Discipline(s): African American Studies, History

Leslie Marmon Silko is one of the key figures in the "Native American Renaissance" of the late twentieth century, the collection of authors, artists, scholars, and activists who produced groundbreaking and popular literary works. Drawing upon her Laguna Pueblo heritage, Siko's work explores themes of cultural traditions, identity, the mingling of tradition with contemporary life, and racism and imperialism. Her acclaimed novel Ceremony touches on all of these issues, as well as veterans confronting and trying to heal from trauma.

Primary Discipline: Literature
Secondary Discipline(s): Native American Studies, Gender Studies

Gabriel García Márquez, (born March 6, 1927, Aracataca, Colombia—died April 17, 2014, Mexico City, Mexico), Colombian novelist and one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 (see Nobel Lecture: “The Solitude of Latin America”), mostly for his masterpiece Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude). He was the fourth Latin American to be so honoured, having been preceded by Chilean poets Gabriela Mistral in 1945 and Pablo Neruda in 1971 and by Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias in 1967. With Jorge Luis Borges, García Márquez is the best-known Latin American writer in history. In addition to his masterly approach to the novel, he was a superb crafter of short stories and an accomplished journalist. In both his shorter and longer fictions, García Márquez achieved the rare feat of being accessible to the common reader while satisfying the most demanding of sophisticated critics.

Primary Discipline: Literature
Secondary Discipline(s): LatinX studies

One of the most prolific Native American thinkers of the twentieth century, Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) was a historian, educator, activist, and theologian. His landmark work, Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) helped bring national attention to Native American issues. He continued this throughout his life and career.

Primary Discipline: History and Native American Studies
Secondary Discipline(s): Philosophy, Religion, Politics

Born Isabella Baumfree in New York, Sojourner Truth escaped slavery in 1827. In 1851, Truth delivered this speech at the Akron, Ohio Women's Rights Convention. The speech was transcribed and printed by Marcus Robinson, but Francis Dana Baker Gage printed and circulated a version in 1863 that gained more notariety. The speech speaks about the treatment of black women compared to their white counterparts, and can be seen as an early comparative text of women's experiences.

Primary Discipline: History
Secondary Discipline(s): African American Studies, Gender Studies, and Women's History

Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) was a Yankton Dakota writer, translator, editor, educator, musician, and Indigenous activits of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An attendee of boarding schools, she later spent her adult life advocating for the rights of Native Americans, and helped establish Native American rights organizations. Her works drew upon her heritage and questions around cultural identity.

Primary Discipline: History
Secondary Discipline(s): Native American Studies, Gender Studies, Women's History

Though he's the illegitimate nephew of a German baron, Candide grows up in a castle under the tutelage of the scholar Pangloss. Pangloss is so enraptured by the Enlightenment--an era of prosperity and intellectual growth--that he proclaims the world to be "the best of all possible worlds." As an adult, Candide tries to cling to this optimistic philosophy despite experiencing a series of horrible misfortunes while striving to be reunited with the woman he loves. The French novel Candide satirizes the philosophies of the Enlightenment and humorously criticizes the nobility, religious viewpoints, and politics of the time. Voltaire--the pen name of French author François-Marie Arouet--first published his satire in 1759. This is an unabridged version of an English translation, published in 1918.

Primary Discipline: Literature

Gilman was an American novelist and writer from the late 19th and early 20th century. Her most famous work is "The Yellow Wallpaper" which is arguably a gothic horror story focusing on the negative mental health consequences of the then famous "rest cure" as a treatment to female hysteria. Her works deal with feminine identity, social conformity, mental health and medical treatment, and the role women play in society. In her later life she wrote about her Eugenics beliefs and race in America, along with women's suffrage.

Primary Discipline: Literature

Friedrich Nietzsche, (born October 15, 1844, Röcken, Saxony, Prussia [Germany]—died August 25, 1900, Weimar, Thuringian States), German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. His attempts to unmask the motives that underlie traditional Western religion, morality, and philosophy deeply affected generations of theologians, philosophers, psychologists, poets, novelists, and playwrights. He thought through the consequences of the triumph of the Enlightenment’s secularism, expressed in his observation that “God is dead,” in a way that determined the agenda for many of Europe’s most-celebrated intellectuals after his death. Although he was an ardent foe of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and power politics, his name was later invoked by fascists to advance the very things he loathed.

Primary Discipline: Philosophy

Karl Marx, in full Karl Heinrich Marx, (born May 5, 1818, Trier, Rhine province, Prussia [Germany]—died March 14, 1883, London, England), revolutionary, sociologist, historian, and economist. He published (with Friedrich Engels) Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848), commonly known as The Communist Manifesto, the most celebrated pamphlet in the history of the socialist movement. He also was the author of the movement’s most important book, Das Kapital. These writings and others by Marx and Engels form the basis of the body of thought and belief known as Marxism.

Primary Discipline: Political Science
Secondary Discipline(s): History

American sociologist, historian, author, editor, and activist who was the most important Black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century (Britanica online). His intellectual work is wide ranging and produced in a variety of forms. He both documented the sturggle for equality in the USA as well as took an active role in that struggle. This text is a sociological study of Black people in the US and set him apart from other Black intellectuals of the time like Booter T. Washington.

Primary Discipline: Sociology
Secondary Discipline(s): History

The end of 18th Century Britain is brought to life in Austen's six novels. Social commentary is depicted through realism and irony that is particularly focused on the accepted norms of the landed gentry and the constraints placed on women.

Primary Discipline: Literature
Secondary Discipline(s): Women's History and Gender Studies

The Constitution acted like a colossal merger, uniting a group of states with different interests, laws, and cultures. Under America’s first national government, the Articles of Confederation, the states acted together only for specific purposes. The Constitution united its citizens as members of a whole, vesting the power of the union in the people. Without it, the American Experiment might have ended as quickly as it had begun.

Primary Discipline: Political Science
Secondary Discipline(s): History

The Declaration of Independence was designed for multiple audiences: the King, the colonists, and the world. It was also designed to multitask. Its goals were to rally the troops, win foreign allies, and to announce the creation of a new country. The introductory sentence states the Declaration’s main purpose, to explain the colonists’ right to revolution. In other words, “to declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” Congress had to prove the legitimacy of its cause. It had just defied the most powerful nation on Earth. It needed to motivate foreign allies to join the fight.

Primary Discipline: Political Science
Secondary Discipline(s): History

A fascinating examination of the relationship between civilization and inequality from one of history's greatest minds The first man to erect a fence around a piece of land and declare it his own founded civil society--and doomed mankind to millennia of war and famine. The dawn of modern civilization, argues Jean-Jacques Rousseau in this essential treatise on human nature, was also the beginning of inequality. One of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, Rousseau based his work in compassion for his fellow man. The great crime of despotism, he believed, was the raising of the cruel above the weak. In this landmark text, he spells out the antidote for man's ills: a compassionate revolution to pull up the fences and restore the balance of mankind.

Primary Discipline: Political Science

Censored in its own time, the Social Contract (1762) remains a key source of democratic belief and is one of the classics of political theory.

Primary Discipline: Political Science

James Madison, in full James Madison, Jr., (born March 16 [March 5, Old Style], 1751, Port Conway, Virginia [U.S.]—died June 28, 1836, Montpelier, Virginia, U.S.), fourth president of the United States (1809–17) and one of the Founding Fathers of his country. At the Constitutional Convention (1787), he influenced the planning and ratification of the U.S. Constitution and collaborated with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay in the publication of the Federalist papers. As a member of the new House of Representatives, he sponsored the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, commonly called the Bill of Rights. He was secretary of state under President Thomas Jefferson when the Louisiana Territory was purchased from France. The War of 1812 was fought during his presidency.

Primary Discipline: Political Science
Secondary Discipline(s): History

The Great Law of Peace provides the foundation for the traditional government of the Haudenosaunee, and constituted by the original Five Nations of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, with the Tuscarora later joining as the Sixth Nation. Onondaga Nation still follows the traditional structure. The Great Law reads as part historical narrative, part governmental framework, with overlays of metaphysics in the message of the Peacemaker. It talks about the responsibilities, obligations, and powers of the chiefs and clan mothers, with a strong emphasis on community health and good authority.

Primary Discipline: History
Secondary Discipline(s): Political Science, Philosophy, Anthropology, Native American Studies
Non-Western Text

Best known for his work of political philosophy, Levithan, published in 1651 during the English Civil War. He is known for his argument that life is "nasty, brutish, and short' in the natural state and that humans come together in societies to gain protection. His work was highly influential in political circles and serves as a foundational text in Western political philosophy, influencing Locke and Rousseau, and, in his metaphysical philosophy, Descartes.

Primary Discipline: Political Philosophy
Secondary Discipline(s): Economics

The term "Kafkaesque" comes from his name and means "characteristic or reminiscent of the oppressive or nightmarish qualities of Franz Kafka's fictional world." (Oxford). His most famous work, The Metamorphosis tells the story of a man who wakes up one day and realizes he has become an insect. All of his works have a dreamlike/nightmare quality to them and are often thought to shed light on fundamental questions of the human condition.

Primary Discipline: Literature

Published originally in 1845, this extremely influential autobiography by Frederick Douglass follows in the tradition of the American slave narrative. In it, he tells his own story of learning to read and write, his eventual escape from slavery, and his own work in the American abolitionist movement. Douglass is one of the preeminent abolitionists of the nineteenth century United States, whose work as an activist, public intellectual, writer, and publisher his work galvanized the abolitionist movement in the United States and abroad.

Primary Discipline: Autobiography
Secondary Discipline(s): Literature, American History, African American History

American sociologist, historian, author, editor, and activist who was the most important Black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century (Britannica online). His intellectual work is wide ranging and produced in a variety of forms. He both documented the struggle for equality in the USA as well as took an active role in that struggle. The Negro is a comprehensive history of the Black people in the US, from first stepping foot on the continent to the time in which it was published.

Primary Discipline: Sociology
Secondary Discipline(s): History

A Pequot and Christian minister, William Apess was an advocate and activist for Native peoples in the northeast during the first half of the nineteenth century. He published is autobiography, A Son of the Forest, in 1829. He helped the Mashpee Wampanoag in Massachusetts defend their lands, and in 1836 he delivered the public lecture, "Eulogy on King Philip," in which he extolled the seventeenth-century Native leader (also known as Metacom) for being as important as any European American leader.

Primary Discipline: History
Secondary Discipline(s): Native American History, Political Science

The writings of Machiavelli, particularly The Prince, are generally political and discuss the acquisition, maintenance, and exercise of power, often using historical examples to illustrate his points, and is known for its pragmatic and amoral approach to politics that emphasizes the importance of maintaining power and stability through any means necessary.

Primary Discipline: Political Science

Shakespeare's 39 plays consist of Comedies, Tragedies and Histories. Each play is filled with complex characters who grapple with the same enduring questions we attempt to understand today. Motives, causes, effects, and consequences all become evident through these dramas.

Primary Discipline: Literature
Secondary Discipline(s): History

American sociologist, historian, author, editor, and activist who was the most important Black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century (Britanica online). His intellectual work is wide ranging and produced in a variety of forms. He both documented the sturggle for equality in the USA as well as took an active role in that struggle. This text is a sociological study of Black people in the US and set him apart from other Black intellectuals of the time like Booter T. Washington.

Primary Discipline: Sociology
Secondary Discipline(s): History

Chinua Achebe, in full Albert Chinualumogu Achebe, (born November 16, 1930, Ogidi, Nigeria—died March 21, 2013, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.), Nigerian novelist acclaimed for his unsentimental depictions of the social and psychological disorientation accompanying the imposition of Western customs and values upon traditional African society. His particular concern was with emergent Africa at its moments of crisis; his novels range in subject matter from the first contact of an African village with the white man to the educated African’s attempt to create a firm moral order out of the changing values in a large city.

Primary Discipline: Literature
Secondary Discipline(s): African Studies

The term "Kafkaesque" comes from his name and means "characteristic or reminiscent of the oppressive or nightmarish qualities of Franz Kafka's fictional world." (Oxford). The Trial is about a man who is charged with a crime that is never named and is thrown into a bureaucratic nightmare because of it. All of his works have a dreamlike/nightmare quality to them and are often thought to shed light on fundamental questions of the human condition.

Primary Discipline: Literature

Among the most influential writings in the history of Western political thought, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration remainvital to political debates today, more than three centuries after they were written. The complete texts appear in this volume, accompanied by interpretive essays by three prominent Locke scholars. Ian Shapiro’s introduction places Locke’s political writings in historical and biographical context. John Dunn explores both the intellectual context in which Locke wrote the Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration andthe major interpretive controversies surrounding their meaning. Ruth Grant offers a comprehensive discussion of Locke’s views on women and the family, and Shapiro contributes an essay on the democratic elements of Locke’s political theory. Taken together, the texts and essays in this volume offer invaluable insights into the history of ideas and the enduring influence of Locke’s political thought.

Primary Discipline: Political Science

More creates his vision of the perfect society on an isolated island. He coined the phrase Utopia from the Greek words "ou-topos" meaning no place and "eu-topos" meaning a good place. Many see this as a socio-political satire while others suggest it is a more serious depiction of a better society.

Primary Discipline: Political Science
Secondary Discipline(s): Philosophy

Friedrich Engels, (born Nov. 28, 1820, Barmen, Rhine province, Prussia [Germany]—died Aug. 5, 1895, London, Eng.), German socialist philosopher, the closest collaborator of Karl Marx in the foundation of modern communism. They coauthored The Communist Manifesto (1848), and Engels edited the second and third volumes of Das Kapital after Marx’s death.

Primary Discipline: Political Science
Secondary Discipline(s): History

Zora Neale Hurston, (born January 7, 1891, Notasulga, Alabama, U.S.—died January 28, 1960, Fort Pierce, Florida), American folklorist and writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance who celebrated the African American culture of the rural South.

Primary Discipline: Literature

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is a 1973 work of short philosophical fiction by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin. With deliberately both vague and vivid descriptions, the narrator depicts a summer festival in the utopian city of Omelas, whose prosperity depends on the perpetual misery of a single child.

Primary Discipline: Literature

Also available here: https://www.ceremade.dauphine.fr/~ekeland/lectures/Mathematical%20Models%20in%20Social%20Sciences/ursula-k-le-guin-the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas.pdf

Though she died penniless and forgotten, Zora Neale Hurston is now recognized as a major figure in African American literature. Even avid readers of Hurston's prose, however, may be surprised to know that she was also a serious and ambitious playwright throughout her career. Although several of her plays were produced during her lifetime--and some to public acclaim--they have languished in obscurity for years. Now, eleven of these forgotten dramatic writings are being published together for the first time in this carefully edited and annotated volume. Filled with lively characters, vibrant images of rural and city life, biblical and folk tales, voodoo, and, most importantly, the blues, readers will discover a ""real" Negro theater" that embraces all the richness of black life.

Primary Discipline: Literature