Christian Wisdom

Concentration Chair: Dr. Peter Redpath

Courses provide the student with a comprehensive understanding of metaphysics. Topics include the One and the Many and the transcendentals of Beauty, Truth and Goodness.

Concentration Goals

  1. To teach students about St. Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysical teaching as a philosophy, science, especially regarding what students of St. Thomas often call the “transcendentals” of being, unity, truth, good, and beauty.
  2. To enable students to understand how these subjects of study related to habits of an acting person to comprise distinct, but essentially connected, principles of philosophy, science.
  3. To allow students to study texts that lay out the main metaphysical teachings of St. Thomas related to the transcendentals and their opposites and how these essentially relate to his teachings about the nature of philosophy, science. Metaphysical truths related to these transcendental principles that underlie Catholic Church teaching will be explained.

Concentration Outcomes

  1. Students will be able to identify St. Thomas’s teaching about each of the transcendentals and their respective opposites (for example, non-being, multiplicity, evil, ugliness).
  2. Students will be able to explain St. Thomas Aquinas’s teachings about faculties and habits of the person and the transcendentals and their opposites, opposition; possession, privation, principles; causes; quantity; quality; virtual quantity; relation; measures; abstraction; and how all the preceding relate to his teaching about science, philosophy, and its unity, divisions, methods, and foundation in sense wonder; how to identify the subject of a science, or division of philosophy; will understand his teaching about predication; analogy; the nature of genera and species; and understand how and why the genus that the philosopher, scientist, studies differs from that of a logician.
  3. Students will show that they understand the pros and cons of major issues in St. Thomas related to all the preceding topics, how philosophical, metaphysical truths, including truths about the human person, underlie all philosophy, science, and Catholic teachings, and the damaging effects that can result to a culture from failure to realize this metaphysical foundation.
  4. Students will demonstrate an understanding of similarities and differences between the teaching of St. Thomas and a phenomenological approach to reality, especially regarding crucial dimensions of human experience such as religion, language, art, education, and technology.

Co-requisites for Philosophy:

  1. PHH 605 Ancient and Medieval Philosophy
  2. PHH 620 Modern and Contemporary Philosophy

Philosophy Core:

  1. PHS 611 Logic and Epistemology
  2. PHS 610 Philosophical Anthropology
  3. PHE 610 Ethics
  4. PHS 621 Philosophy of Nature and Metaphysics

Concentration Core:

  1. PHS 731 The One and the Many
  2. PHS 741 Saint Thomas on Being and Nothingness
  3. PHS 751 The True, the False, the Lie and the Fake
  4. PHS 761 The Good, the Bad, the Beautiful and the Ugly

Note: Students must complete PHS 731 before taking PHS 761.

Concentration Electives

  1. PHS 783 Dante’s Divine Comedy: Thomistic Philosophy in Narrative
  2. PHE 617 The Personalism of John Paul II

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