Honors Program

The Trinity College of Florida Honors Program offers an opportunity for motivated students to enhance their college experience through participation in four Honors Seminars as part of the General Education curriculum.  This reading and writing intensive program is open to all students. 

Program Content

To complete the Honors Program students take four Honors Seminars over the course of two years.  Honors Seminars are Great Books courses in which students read and discuss foundational works in world culture.  The professor in an Honors Seminar leads the group in a shared inquiry into the meaning and application of the text being read. 

The four Honors Seminars replace four courses in the students General Education program:

• Introduction to Philosophy
• Introduction to Science
• History elective (1) 
• Literature elective (1)

Students have the option of taking less than four Honors Seminars.  Every completed course is designated as an Honors course on their transcript.  Students completing all four seminars receive an Honors diploma at graduation. 

Honors I

Reading List

Homer, The Iliad

Herodotus, The Histories

Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers

Aeschylus, The Eumenides

Sophocles, Antigone,

Sophocles, Oedipus the King,

Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

Aristotle, Poetics

Thucydides, Peloponnesian War

Euripides, Medea,

Euripides, The Bacchae

Aristophanes, Clouds

Plato, Apology

Plato, Symposium

Plato, The Republic

Plato, Phaedrus

Honors II

Reading List

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Aristotle, On the Soul

Lucretius, The Way Things Are

Cicero, On the Commonwealth

Virgil, The Aeneid

Epictetus, The Handbook

Augustine, Confessions

Anselm, Proslogion

The Song of Roland

Bonaventure, The Journey of the Mind to God

Aquinas, On Faith, Summa Theologiae

Dante, The Inferno

Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales

Petrarch, “Ascent of Mount Ventoux”

Petrarch, “On His Own Ignorance and that of Many Others”

Erasmus, Praise of Folly

Machiavelli, The Prince

Honors III

Reading List

Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian”

Thomas More, Utopia

Michel Montaigne, various readings

Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle

Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote

William Shakespeare, MacBeth

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Francis Bacon, The New Organon

Renee Descartes, Discourse on Method

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

John Milton, Samson Agonistes

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Rousseau, various readings

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Honors IV

Reading List

Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population

Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

Alexis DeTocqueville, Democracy in America

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty,”

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Karl Marx, various readings

Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch

How to Enter the Program

To enter the program students should register for the Honors Seminar offered for a particular semester.  Students will work with their advisor and the Registrar’s Office to determine which general education courses will be substituted for the Honors Seminar selected.     

For more information on this and other degree programs, visit the College’s Academic Catalog.