Philosophy (Core)

A course in philosophical anthropology, studying many aspects of human nature: sensation, emotion, thought, will, habits, soul, and body.

This course is for students who are studying moral philosophy for the first time. As long as there have been human beings, morality has been a question—its foundations, its nature, its forms, and its very possibility. By studying classic works of philosophy, especially Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, students will engage with the most fundamental questions that motivate ethical reflection: What does it mean to be human? What makes for a good life? How shall we live? What is the relationship between morality and happiness? The course will focus particular attention on the riches of the Catholic intellectual tradition and its emphasis on practical reasoning, the dignity of the person, virtue ethics, and the natural law.

An introduction to metaphysics, the philosophical discipline concerned with questions about the nature of reality, about what there is, and about the principles, causes, and properties of what exists. Because metaphysics asks fundamental questions about all of being, one of its central tasks is to account for the unity of human knowledge and for the relationship among all the various parts of human knowledge. Because it seeks after the causes of being, metaphysics culminates in philosophical theology, a consideration of what can be known about God through human reason.