You need to know at least one foreign language well enough so that you can read the best literature that that language has produced in the original, and so you carry on a reasonable conversation and have dreams in that language. There are several reasons why this is crucial, but the most important is perhaps this: you can never understand one language until you understand at least two.

You need to know enough of the natural sciences so that you are not a stranger in the world.

You need to know enough philosophy so that the methods of logical analysis are available to you to be used as a tool. One of the most depressing things about e…

The student should have enough knowledge of his or her cultural tradition to know how it got to be the way it is. This involves both political and social histo…