The Library
Syllabuses
Curated reading lists composed by Fellows. Each is ordered; each carries the author’s notes on why this text, and why here.
Wonders, Marvels, and the Drôle de Pensée
A reading on the strange-aware imagination of seventeenth-century Europe — the cabinet of curiosities as institution, the wonder-book as genre, and the place of Leibniz's 1675 sketch within that imagination. The Aca…
8 items · The AcademyMind-BendersThe Lost History of Serious Play
A reading list for the Fellow who wishes to see why this Academy treats games as serious instruments of cognition and culture — and why the European tradition once took this for granted. Begins with the theoretical…
8 items · The AcademyMind-BendersThe Glass Bead Game and the Vision of Castalia
A syllabus on Hesse's novel — the book from which this discipline takes its name. The aim is to read the novel slowly, then to take seriously the question of what kind of institution it imagined and whether such a t…
7 items · The AcademyCastaliaPlato's Republic: the Divided Line and the Cave
A focused syllabus on the two great images of Republic VI–VII: the divided line and the cave. The aim is not to settle the long-running interpretive debates but to read the central books closely, with enough comment…
7 items · The AcademyMind-BendersLeibniz's Monadology and the Universal Characteristic
A reading list for the Fellow who wishes to understand the Academy's namesake project — the two great Leibnizian ambitions, taken together: a metaphysics in which the universe is composed of perspective-bearing simp…
7 items · The AcademyMind-Benders