Philosophy Course Guides

Over the past several years, I have been fortunate to teach philosophy to the seminarians of the Wichita Diocese. They attend Newman University and live in community at the St. Joseph House of Formation. Since Newman has a very small philosophy faculty, I’ve also had to teach most of the curriculum.

In this post, I offer some examples of how I have understood teaching philosophy to Catholic seminarians in the hopes of receiving feedback and perhaps affording others insight into their own approaches to teaching. The main example discussed are the Course Guides which I have developed to lighten the teaching load and aid students in their study.

The philosophy sequence at Newman University for seminarians is as follows:

• Logic
• History of Ancient Philosophy
• History of Medieval Philosophy
• History of Modern Philosophy
• Philosophy of Nature
• Philosophy of the Human Person
• Virtue Ethics
• Catholic Social and Political Philosophy
• Thomistic Metaphysics 
• Thomistic Epistemology
• Natural Theology
• Philosophy Seminar (optional)

The major students earn is “Philosophy for Theological Studies” (a story for another day). The list of courses is, from what I can tell and from what the PPF (6e) outlines, fairly standard. We recently completed a revision to this effect, and in that process I found Michael Gorman’s article in the Thomist helpful for thinking about philosophy instruction: “Thomas Aquinas in Intellectual Formation: Philosophy.” Towards that same end, I have also benefited from Paul Seaton’s essay “Teaching Philosophy in Today’s Seminary Context.”

In this reflection, I first consider teaching philosophy to seminarians, guided by wise words from Msgr. Robert Sokolowski. Then, I describe why I made Course Guides for my courses, and what they are (and what they are not: manuals). Lastly, I describe how I approach teaching the philosophy sequence with these Course Guides. In this post, I review the Course Guides for Logic, Philosophy of the Human Person, Virtue Ethics, Political Philosophy, Epistemology, and Natural Theology. The guides for the history courses (which are extant) I discuss briefly, and the Philosophy of Nature and Metaphysics guides I hope to discuss in a later post. The appendix to this post includes a copy these Course Guides and related Course Readers.

ON TEACHING PHILOSOPHY TO SEMINARIANS

Philosophy in seminary formation has an overarching telos or end-goal that is, in a certain way, extrinsic to philosophy, i.e., not determined by philosophical inquiry as such, but by the educational needs of the Church. Nonetheless, it is still formed in its sequence and substance by the tradition of education in philosophy that has been developed since the founding of Catholic universities in Europe and which is expressed in various doctrinal and governing documents of the Catholic Church.¹ Just as pre-professional training has requirements and standards in other areas (medicine, law, architecture), so too the study of theology for seminarians of the Church requires a certain standard, order, and substance of the philosophy curriculum.² 

At the same time, the study of theology requires philosophy for the non-arbitrary and intrinsic reason that grace presupposes and perfects nature. The light of faith does not contradict but further illuminates the objects available to the natural light of reason. Philosophical inquiry can demonstrate certain preambles of the faith (praeambula fidei), illuminate truths of the faith through analogies drawn from natural truths, and refute rationalist or naturalistic objections against the faith.³ 

These extrinsic and intrinsic goals show how true intellectual freedom still obtains among the students and faculty of philosophy in seminary studies.⁴ Furthermore, they account for why the aim is not, as such, to produce “philosophers” in the sense of academic experts or scholars. Rather, the end

is to try to make [seminary students] philosophical, to have a sense of how questions can be pursued, to have a number of strategic distinctions and definitions clearly in mind, and to be able to respond with philosophical understanding to questions people raise. Many of the issues that people bring to priests are simply human problems and not exclusively theological or religious ones, and in most cases even if they are more specifically theological they also have a human or philosophical component. The aim of a seminary philosophy program is to equip the seminarian and then the priest with a certain vocabulary and certain intellectual habits. He should become better able to use such words as responsibility, meaning, the human person, human nature, moral obligation, virtue and vice, and the like, and to use these words thoughtfully. He should be able to bring out with some clarity important natural things, things that are accessible to reason.⁵

The philosophical soul in preparation for theological studies ought to be “[equipped] . . . with a certain vocabulary,” that is, the ability to see distinctions and insights into truths available to natural reason. These “human and philosophical issues” remain relevant even in specifically theological contexts. A soul so equipped is educated with the habits of mind needed interiorize the harmony between faith and reason. “The encyclical Fides et Ratio,” Sokolowski observes, “declares that the mission of the Church in the modern world is not only to proclaim the faith, but also ‘to restore faith in reason,’ to show people that their own rational powers are capable of attaining truth about the world, about themselves, and even about God.”⁶

This requires that students understand the questions, methods, arguments, and conclusions of speculative and practical philosophy.⁷ The terms “questions, methods, arguments, and conclusions” are meant to indicate the inner structure of philosophical inquiry. This inquiry begins in wonder, raising questions about what and why. It must cast about and seek answers to those questions, and avoid doing so in a random way but in accord with the subject at hand—hence methods and not ‘a method’ are needed (see Metaphysics, II.3, 995a12; Nicomachean Ethics, I.3, 1094b12). It also seeks a rational resolution to, a judgment about, its questions; this is had through argument, and in some cases more determinately or with higher certitude or clarity than others. Finally, a rational resolution is not complete unless it reaches its telos, a true conclusion through a causal explanation: “For all men begin, as we said, by wondering that the matter is so . . . but we must end in the contrary and, according to the proverb, the better state, as is the case in these instances when men learn the cause.”⁸

That conclusions are reached may seem contrary to some common attitudes towards philosophy: for instance, that its very perfection lies precisely in never-ending Socratic aporiae (originally: roadblocks)about the question itself. However, St. Augustine devotes an entire dialogue—his Against the Academics—to the determination of whether philosophy is perfected in its search for the truth or if it is perfected in its attainment of the truth. He argues for the latter.

Indeed, these extrinsic and intrinsic teleological causes permit a more perfect, if more demanding, possibility to philosophical inquiry. That is, without harming the inner autonomy and integrity of philosophical inquiry, the truths taught by the Church can illuminate, by the light of faith, the goal of rational inquiry, albeit not the means to attain the goal.⁹ For instance, the Catholic student of philosophy can know by faith that Immanuel Kant’s idealism resulting in speculative agnosticism about God’s existence must be wrong, but such supernatural certainty will not help the student answer an exam question asking him to argue why Kant is in error. Indeed, it is crucial to see that faith will not help him understand philosophically why Kant is wrong. In this way, “it is faith which stirs reason to move beyond all isolation and willingly to run risks so that it may attain whatever is beautiful, good and true. Faith thus becomes the convinced and convincing advocate of reason.”¹⁰ Faith calls reason to attain its proper measure and stature.

Sokolowski’s consideration of philosophy in a seminary curriculum is exemplary in drawing attention to the possibilities of the topics, questions, and conclusions possible here. For the sake of some completeness, and to clearly relate these topics to the next section, I draw upon Sokolowski’s indications of the specific substance of philosophic inquiry along with the courses in the Major that ought devote themselves to such substance.¹¹

• Philosophy of Nature, Human Person; Metaphysics
  • a sense of causality and the various kinds of causality (efficient, material, formal, and final, as well as instrumental)
  • be taught the difference between the essential and the accidental in things
  • be shown that whenever we speak about something, some of the essentials of that thing are being put into play (that if we speak at all we cannot avoid what is often disparaged as “essentialism”)
  • the concept of the natures of things (to show that things do have natures; that they are not merely shapeless, meaningless entities that we can make use of as we see fit for our own purposes)
  • a sense of the ends that things have, their internal final causes, their teleologies (and to distinguish such ends from the purposes we have when we make use of things)
  • how it is possible to argue for the existence of God from such understanding of natural things
  • how human language can be used analogically to speak about God’s very being
  • the various attributes of God’s being; how factor in as preambles of the faith
  • realize the “poverty and riches” of metaphysics and natural theology when it comes to understanding divine providence, the presence of evil in the universe, and the nature of God’s act of creation and the goodness of the created order
• Ethics; Human Person
  • the meaning of human responsibility and choice (the way they are differentiated from non-responsible conduct; the role of compulsion and ignorance as exculpatory)
  • the differences between: virtue and self control, between vice and weakness, the intellectual and moral virtues
  • the way the theoretic life is lived in regard to knowledge and art
  • the meanings of justice and friendship (and the sorts of friendship and the “dynamics” of human friendship)
  • the sense of personal identity over time (the role of memory and anticipation)
  • the way actions shape a character and shape the person himself
  • the meaning of the principle of double effect, the distinction between the intended and the foreseen
  • the philosophical definitions of the various human appetites, inclinations, and emotions (such as love and hate, pleasure and pain, anger, indignation, cruelty, kindness, gratitude, resentment, envy, admiration, contempt, etc.)
• Catholic Social & Political Philosophy¹²
  • what the political society is as opposed to the family and other pre-political associations
  • the nature of citizenship and the shifts and changes that occur in political life
  • the nature of the common good, the varieties of common good, and their relationship of non-competitive primacy to the individual good of the human person
• Logic; Epistemology; Metaphysics
  • what words are; how words are used to make judgments; how judgments are blended into arguments
  • the most common fallacies; distinguish rhetoric from dialectics
  • the difference between perception and understanding
  • how we take responsibility for the things that we speak
  • how the human person, the agent of truth, expresses the nature of things when he communicates with others
  • the role of other people in helping us know the truth, and the role of tradition
  • the way an ancient text can still speak to us know, with undiminished force and clarity
  • the hermeneutic problem of a text (the question of how there can be meaning in a text over a long period of time and in very different contexts, is obviously of great importance for the study of Holy Scripture)
  • the difference between science and common sense; and the difference between science and philosophy (show what science can tell us as well as what it cannot speak about, and why; show that while science gives us truth, there are also other things that are true as well; and other ways of coming to the truth)
  • it is not the task of philosophy to somehow prove that there is such a thing as truth (rather, it is its task to bring out the various ways of achieving truth; and precisely in making these distinctions philosophy will have established the possibility of truth)
  • the discussion of truth also involves a discussion of the various forms of error, ignorance, and concealment

It is to questions, discussions, and arguments about topics such as these that the specific substance of the philosophy curriculum can turn its attention, and the tradition of philosophical education in the Church provides many and varied insightful conclusions about these questions. The pedagogical necessities of inspiring philosophical wonder in students need not be in competition with achieving a resolution to the Socratic aporetic (as a necessary stage of the process) by reaching answers to questions of obviously great importance: “It would be extremely important and extremely interesting for the student to understand these things . . . . One might even ask, with some exasperation, ‘Why on earth would anyone not want to learn such things?’ not only in the seminary but in college programs as well.”¹³

Philosophy has a longstanding feud with the Sophists. Likewise, philosophy for seminary studies of its nature seeks for a curriculum to instruct students in “the distinction between thinking and speaking rhetorically and thinking and speaking philosophically,” for “a well ordered program in philosophy can help the Catholic clergy to be beacons of light in a foggy world, agents of reason and not just bullhorns of sentimentality.”¹⁴

ON THE NEED FOR COURSE GUIDES

The philosophy curriculum draws its materials from tradition of perennial philosophy. Its principal sources are therefore primary texts, but these are not to be set in opposition to helpful secondary sources. Sokolowski discusses something similar in what follows.

I would also like to suggest that it would be a good idea to develop textbooks for the courses listed above. The tendency now is for teachers to develop their own courses on the basis of primary texts and selected readings, but I think it would be advisable to have books that summarized the most important concepts in each of the courses I have mentioned. A textbook of this nature need not be coextensive with the entire course, but it could provide the core content of the course, the basic material that definitely ought to be covered. More material could be added at the discretion of the teacher, but the basics should be made available in a systematic way. I think that students benefit from a good textbook. It provides order in the course, and it makes sure that the essentials have been presented. Such texts could also be a great help to teachers.¹⁵

One should proceed cautiously when trying to understand such a suggestion. As Pater Edmund Waldstein points out about the “manuals” of old, “Only to someone who has thought about the questions that he treats a good deal before hand, and seen the many difficulties involved in trying to answer could Grenier’s [manualist and] highly formal and apodictic presentation be enjoyable and exciting.” One must first get hold of the difficulties (as Aristotle says in his Metaphysics); one must first appreciate the question before one can appreciate the answer. While manuals have been, in my estimation, more unjustly than justly maligned, it is easy to see how they could be misused as teaching tools.

It was with such a pair of considerations in mind that I set out to write Course Guides for the various philosophy courses that I have been tasked to teach at Newman University. On the one hand, they are not textbooks, although they do include materials that would otherwise be handouts. On the other hand, the Guides are not manuals, as they contain many questions designed to help students think through the primary and secondary materials of the course.

A Course Guide, then, are more than mere maps for a given course and yet far from being an answer key.  The Guide provides the same supports of order to a long and complicated course of study as did the manuals, but without running the risk of providing parrotable information which students must simply memorize so as to thereby “learn” the material. Indeed, most of what I hope students will learn in a course is not itself written in down in the indicative mood in the Guide.

Thus, there are many questions in each chapter. For each chapter, there are general questions. Students are asked to formulate answers to these general questions based upon their own experience and prior knowledge. These general questions, in some instances, serve as review questions.

There are also “Pre-Reading,” “Reading,” and “Post-Reading” questions. The Guide asks students to take a moment to reflect on these questions and answer them, even if the answers are approximations or only raise more questions in their minds. I ask students to note down their answers, try to see any of their imperfections, and consider what it might take to improve them. The “Reading” questions range from the very straightforward to requiring some thought to piece together. “Post-Reading” questions are those, or those similar to, ones we will tackle in class discussion.

Above all, the Course Guides hope to serve the reading and discussion and study of the course. The try to lead with wonder and initial dialectic. They provide “colorful” examples and illustrations and quotations from various sources complementary to the main readings.

THE COURSE GUIDES FOR PHILOSOPHY

With the above background in mind, I offer some more specific descriptive comments about the various Course Guides.

Logic

The logic course makes use of Houser’s Logic as a Liberal Art along with primary sources. The order of Houser’s text (which I reviewed for Thomistica) follows the classical division of the three acts of logic. Its best features are clear and accessible explanations and highly engaging exercise sets which allow for many a “teachable moment.” Additionally, his book begins with chapters on grammar and rhetoric. It would be a mistake to skip these. While they cannot replace studies of grammar and rhetoric (nor are they meant to), these chapters help students begin to attend to the differences in how we use the language arts, how a grammarian considers predication differently than a logician or a rhetorician, for example.

In the latest iteration of the course, I included a couple weeks discussion and student demonstration of selected propositions in Euclid’s Elements, Book I at the board (with notes). This is not intended merely as an opportunity to talk about the self-education of Abraham Lincoln (or how some have argued that Euclid shapes his famous rhetorical style). Rather, the experience of reasoning is something upon which we can later draw for further insight and examples. Indeed, it has been a hard-won lesson in my teaching experience about the extent to which imaginative and inductive preparation cannot be skipped if students are to engage well with philosophical discussion. The same can be said about proper focus upon aporia as well.

The logic course also has features more peculiar to my interests or items that some classes find more interesting than others. For instance, I include a discussion of the nature and limits of symbolic logic and why it is not sufficient as a tool for human reasoning. An appendix also includes—but I have not always used—a discussion of the truth or falsity of future contingent statements.

The History Sequence

It should be clear that the three-course sequence in the history of philosophy (Ancient, Medieval, and Modern) will inevitably introduce the student to many philosophers discussing most, if not all, of the topics mentioned above by Sokolowski. However, it should also be noted that the history of philosophy can be a danger to a liberal education and philosophy as such. To illustrate this, consider the following observations:

If you ask the proverbial man on the street what strikes him first about the philosophers, taken as a group, he will tell you many things. But I think one of the first things he would tell you is that they disagree. One way of putting it is: They all have their own philosophies. He would also tend to think of those disagreements as being a kind of permanent condition: The philosophers do not move from disagreement to agreement; they move from disagreement to further disagreement.

I can recall when my brothers and I were going to college, we were studying philosophy, and we would sit at the dining room table and talk about this, that, and the other thing, and my mother would sit there listening to us with a certain horror. Finally, she would say, “Why can’t they agree?” And I thought that was an eminently reasonable reaction. When she listened to that discussion, what she heard was simply disagreement. Her reaction to it was the natural, normal, right, and human reaction: This is something that should not be. Maybe it is something that must be, something that we cannot avoid, because men are men, but it is something that should not be. It is like disease and misbehavior, things that despite all of our efforts continue to take place but do us no good. It is just an evil in that we must lament.

I think this is a stumbling block to the beginner. Perhaps not to all beginners, because when you begin with a certain faith in certain things, you can weather the storm more successfully. But without that it is difficult and discouraging. It leads to a kind of feeling or conclusion that philosophical effort can never really bear fruit. What Descartes says about his education seems to be proved in your own life: If anybody knew the truth, surely he could persuade the others. This disagreement would not persist century after century after century. This problem tends to be compounded by imprudent teaching in which the teacher tends to lay before the student too many disagreements at once about too many things. He is overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the disagreement. Things are proposed to him out of order. He is forced to confront fundamental and wide-ranging disagreements without being able to resolve them. Everything comes to him at once. These things lead to philosophical despair.¹⁶

The connection to the instruction of the history of philosophy should be clear. It is easy to pile on, seemingly at random, an endless string of fundamental and seemingly intractable disagreements and perspectives about the clearly important matters of substantial wonder listed above. The history of philosophy becomes a sequence of one darn thing after another. As Berquist goes on to describe, however, the disagreement of philosophers can be an opportunity, for “War is the father of all,” as Heraclitus said.¹⁷ That is, “It is only through disagreement, contradiction, contrary arguments, that one’s understanding ever has a chance to grow.”¹⁸ The qualifier “manner of a liberal education” in the fourth Goal means that the history courses must avoid inculcating despair at finding the truth, avoid the impression that studying the details of such disagreements is itself what philosophy means, and rather use philosophy’s own history to motivate the student towards a more disciplined, attentive wonder about resolving philosophical questions, for philosophy is not easy.¹⁹

The “manner of a liberal education” also means that certain constant themes, questions, methods, arguments, and conclusions must be brought out in the history courses: this is the “perennial discussion and substance” within philosophy’s history. Thus, the texts must be approached without overly historicizing them, and rather with an emphasis upon the rational engagement that transcends history and which such texts are apt of their very character to provide.²⁰ This means that the “arc” of this historical narrative is not indifferent to truth and falsity.²¹ This also means that the “narrative” of the historical sequence must have an eye towards the systematic demands of the later courses.

Philosophy of the Human Person

In the course sequence, the Philosophy of Nature course precedes the Human Person course. However, I am completing the Philosophy of Nature Guide as well as revising the Metaphysics guide, and so I will describe these in a follow-up post. The above course sequence for Newman’s seminary philosophy major was recently revised to allow space for the Philosophy of Nature course, prior to which Metaphysics and Human Person filled in for its lack.

The Human Person course begins with a dramatic setting. Indeed, many courses I teach begin with a novel or short story as part of the imaginative preparation for students. For instance, Philosophy of Nature begins with Frankenstein. The Human Person course begins with C. S. Lewis’s book That Hideous Strength. It is, as it were, the Catholic version of Brave New World and the better for it.

The second part of the course is a study of Aristotle’s De Anima. This is a difficult series of weeks, and it is so by design. Students are not expected to master the text, but rather gain enough familiarity with it so that we can refer back to it in the last two parts of the course. Aristotle serves as our master to ask the right questions and begin the best answers in the study of soul.

The last two parts of the course make use of two contemporary works—which I hesitate to call textbooks but which are, in fact, splendid introductions to the modern study of soul. A key reason why we use such texts is that it might seem as if modern science and philosophy have displaced Aristotle and Aquinas—but that is not  true.

The third part of the course dives deeply into the contemporary debates surrounding the three main  theories of the human person (materialism, dualism, and hylomorphism). In it, we read James Madden’s Mind, Matter, and Nature. At key junctures, the dialectical portions of De Anima, Book I or the various points made in Books II and III are recalled. 

The fourth part of the course uses Jensen’s The Human Person: A Beginner’s Thomistic Psychology, to complement Madden, since Jensen’s text includes a much more extensive analysis of the soul’s powers as well as the emotions. Certain chapters in Jensen are skipped because of our use of Madden. Again, the De Anima, especially Books II and III, are recalled and reviewed in light of Jensen’s explanations.

Virtue Ethics

The ethics course is, after the aforementioned revisions to the major at Newman, now titled Virtue Ethics. The philosophical movements of the course are five in number, at least in the last iteration when I taught the course to majors only.

The first part begins with another novel to consider various questions and problems regarding ethics as a subject. We read some Plato as well as MacIntyre on ethical disagreement. The novel is Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, which puts these questions in more immediate and dramatic perspective in the character of Binx, the ethically aimless protagonist.

The other four parts of the course work through Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics alongside assigned excerpts from Jensen’s Living the Good Life. The second part explores Book I in depth about the dialectic and definition of human happiness. The third part explores the various virtues with a focus on the cardinal virtues. The discussion of justice also allows us to engage with utilitarianism and deontology. (However, an alternative version of the course would incorporate more primary sources at this juncture.) The fourth part of the course takes time to study friendship in Books VIII and IX of the Ethics. 

Finally, as Aristotle himself ends his Ethics with a reconsideration the same notion of happiness which he defined at the outset of the book, so does the course. It gives us a chance to review the course as a whole and compare and contrast Aristotle’s vision of happiness with that of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Catholic Social and Political Philosophy

The political philosophy course is the one with which I am least satisfied. The first time I taught it, we simply read through Rommen’s The State in Catholic Thought with various supplements. In the current version, we still use Rommen’s masterpiece in the background, but foreground primary texts: Aristotle’s Politics and Aquinas’s Treatise on Law, among others.

The first part of the course, however, does feature reading a novel, the science fiction tale A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. It provides a dramatic, civilization-scale context for the course in its cyclical imitation of Church-state relations and Western civilization.

In the second part of the course, we study the bulk of Aristotle’s Politics. In a similar fashion to the Human Person course reading the De Anima, the goal of reading the Politics is not to master every page, but to gain familiarity with the sorts of questions and answers the understanding of which we hope to deepen. Usually, the paper at this part of the course asks students to compare and contrast Aristotle’s polis with the modern state.

The next part of the course considers law, justice, and the principles of economics. We read the central questions from St. Thomas Aquinas’s famous “Treatise on Law.” We also read questions on right, justice, and various topics such as property. For principles of economics, we usually read various papal encyclicals and commentary on the moral principles of economics. In the last iteration, I found Leo Clarke’s Man and the Economy very helpful.

The concluding parts of the course consider principles of the political order that involve the state in extrinsic relationships with other entities. This includes a discussion of just war theory, using sources from St. Thomas and others. We also discuss the history and norms of the relationship between the Catholic Church and states. In this, Rommen’s chapters on the subject, especially its history, are unmatched for scope and depth. We conclude the course with a study of prudence, kingship, and peace.

Thomistic Epistemology

Strictly speaking, epistemology is not a formal discipline within the classic division of philosophy. For the Thomistic approach, it is a melange of logic, study of the soul’s cognitive powers, and a metaphysics of truth. The following is what I have settled on after several iterations.

The philosophical movements of the course are four. While the course does not begin in its first part with a novel, we do read the short story “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges. In lieu of a novel, we then read Plato’s Theaetetus in its entirety (and the students write a paper on it). The Theaetetus raises in its essentials all of the questions of the course.

The course then studies knowledge in three parts: the logic of knowledge as it is sought and achieved and the causes of knowledge in the human soul. The logic of knowledge I divide into two parts: scientific knowledge and belief.

Thus, the second part of the course considers various paradigm cases of scientific knowledge as examples. We read and discuss Euclid’s Elements, Book I. This is followed by a discussion of “Geometry and Empirical Science” a positivist text by Hempel. Various examples from the natural sciences are also considered, especially William Harvey’s explorations of the human heart. Throughout this part of the course, we focus on the conditions of science, with particular guidance from Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics and William Wallace’s The Modeling of Nature, especially chapters from Part II, which consider the demonstrative regress.

The third part of the course considers other cases of knowledge. What does it mean to only believe something? When might this be an advantageous good? We read most of our namesake St. Newman’s famous work An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. It is, without fail, the most difficult book students have read but—as students report when they reach fundamental theology—one of the most helpful.

The final part of the course explores deeper considerations of the soul’s cognitive powers than did the Human Person course. Currently, this is accomplished through a reading of Yves Simon’s essay on sensation as well as a selction from the Treatise on Man from the Summa Theologiae. In a future semester, this may be modified to include portions of Feser’s Immortal Souls.

Natural Theology

This course is essentially the capstone of the course sequence of the Philosophy for Theological Studies major. It introduces and leads students through that most difficult of philosophical topics, the existence and nature of God. All of the other philosophy courses are, in some way or other, preparatory for this course. The course itself is divided into four parts: the first part raises various difficulties and problems, the second considers the existence of God, the third considers God’s nature, and the fourth part considers God’s relationship to the world as its creator. The first part is crucial for the students, because its sets the imaginative stage for the course and is designed to invite them to personally invest in the course’s philosophical approach to God. This philosophical approach is more difficult for the vast majority of my students especially, since most of them are practicing Catholics. To ask them to work through by reasoning and achieve what they already have through faith is difficult.

In the early version of this course, the first part was very anemic and there was no writing component associated with it. Over the years, I have strengthened this part of the course to make it more effective. What is included in the current, but not the earlier, version of the course are the following texts to set the stage. We read and discuss: J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Ainulindalë” from the Silmarillion, the entirety of David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, excerpts from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (the chapter “Rebellion”), brief portions of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as well as the Critique of Practical Reason, and various other selections. There is also a short paper (not included in the early version of the course). This first paper assignment is to write up and explain a problem or objection that Hume raises. They must first see things from Hume’s point of view. This helps them to put their thoughts about Hume into clearer focus, apart from any emotional reaction against him. For some of them, they choose to write their second, longer paper to analyze and rebut Hume, relying upon material we study later in the course.

The second, third, and fourth parts of the course study passages from St. Thomas Aquinas’s masterpiece, Summa Theologiae. In early versions of the course, I did not include certain secondary sources and supplements which students now find helpful: e.g., Michael Dodds’ book One Creator God (published 2020), Matthew Levering’s Proofs of God (published 2016), or Edward Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God (published 2017). 

We pay special attention to ST, Ia, q. 13, the question on the names of God. While St. Thomas notes various principles of “theological grammar” prior to q. 13, it is with a slow reading of at least the first six articles of this question that students can see their way to refuting Hume’s caricatures. The Thomistic via media beyond the mysticism of Demea and the anthropomorphism of Cleanthes becomes clear.

THE COURSE GUIDES

I would not claim that these Guides are the best they could be, given my own courses, nor that they are best for others. However, I have found that having them as a resource makes classroom discussions easier. One must, of course, presume upon adequate student preparation. For those who wish to see them in more detail, I link the ones discussed in this post below.

Course guides not included here because subject to further revision: Philosophy of Nature as well as Metaphysics.

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¹ See the USCCB’s Program for Priestly Formation (PPF), 6th ed. (2022), particularly pp. 118–23; Pope Francis, Apostolic Constitution Veritatis Gaudium (29 January 2018; link here); Pope St. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio (14 September 1998; link here); Pope Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris (4 August 1879; link here).

² See Robert Sokolowski, “Philosophy in the Seminary Curriculum,” Homiletic and Pastoral Review 104 (2004): 14–22, at 14. See also PPF, 56–58.

³ See St. Thomas Aquinas, Super Boetium de Trinitate, q. 2, a. 3, c., available in Faith, Reason, and Theology: Questions I-IV of His Commentary on the “De Trinitate” of Boethius, trans. by A. Maurer (Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1987), 49.

⁴ Sokolowski, “Philosophy in the Seminary Curriculum,” 14–15.

⁵ Ibid., 16–17.

⁶ Robert Sokolowski, Christian Faith & Human Understanding: Studies on the Eucharist, Trinity, and the Human Person (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 123. See also “Philosophy in the Seminary Curriculum,” 15.

⁷ See St. Thomas, Sententia Ethicorum, lib. 1, lect. 1; also, Super Boetium de Trinitate, q. 5, a. 1, c., available in The Division and Methods and the Sciences: Questions V and VI of His Commentary on the “De Trinitate” of Boethius, trans. by A. Maurer, 2nd ed. (Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1958), 9–24.

⁸ Aristotle, Metaphysics, I.2, 983b13–19 (Barnes ed.).

⁹ See Fides et Ratio, nn. 49–56.

¹⁰ Ibid., n. 56.

¹¹ See Sokolowski, “Philosophy in the Seminary Curriculum,” 19–20, for the original list. Most of what I provide here are effectively quotations of Sokolowski.

¹² Sokolowski’s comment here is instructive, 19: “This kind of study would not try to make priests into ersatz politicians but to make them capable of evaluating public policies and helping people to be good citizens and to preserve their freedom. The clergy must be helped to avoid credulity and oversimplification in regard to public life.”

¹³ Ibid., 19.

¹⁴ Sokolowski, “Philosophy in the Seminary Curriculum,” 20.

¹⁵ Sokolowski, “Philosophy in the Seminary Curriculum,” 21.

¹⁶ Marcus R. Berquist, “Where Philosophers Disagree,” in Learning and Discipleship: The Collected Papers of Marcus Berquist, ed. by A. S. Forsyth (Santa Paula, CA: Thomas Aquinas College, 2019), 309–310.

¹⁷ Ibid., 310.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ See ibid., 310–12.

²⁰ The historical interpretation is presented, for instance, by Jorge J. E. Gracia, Philosophy and Its History (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), 216: “An interpretation of a text (composed of a historical text and the interpretative additions of an interpreter) should be to the contemporary audience with respect to the production of their contemporary acts of understanding as the historical text is to the historical audience (composed of the author as audience and the contemporaneous audience) with respect to the acts of understanding of the historical audience.” 

The timeless alternative is described by Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame, IN: UND Press, 1991), 45: “A piece of writing, whenever it confronts a reader—or indeed a set speech, when it is reuttered to a new hearer—does so at a time which is not only ‘now’ for that reader or hearer, but becomes the author’s coincident ‘now,’ no matter how long previously the work was written or spoken. In that shared time, exempted in some respects, although not in others from the temporal separation of the ‘now’ of utterance from the ‘now’ of reading or hearing, the timelessness extends to the standards of reason-giving, reason-accepting, and reason rejecting.”

²¹ See Ralph M. McInerny, Praeambula Fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers (Washington, D.C: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 134: “Histories of philosophy will speak of rises and declines, of golden ages and ages of decadence, and these are philosophical judgments. A historian of medieval thought who takes the achievement of Thomas Aquinas as regulative will be making a philosophical argument about the history of medieval philosophy. So be it. In much the same way, histories of logic rank historical periods from the viewpoint of an understanding of modern logic. They will be found to ask whether there is any logic in the logical works of Aristotle. This can lead to anachronism, it can blind the historian to real achievement in the past of his discipline. To hold with Quine that logic is an old discipline and since 1879 it has been a great one is not just a historical statement. The demand for ‘impure’ history may be the most purist view of all.” The impossibilities and undesirability in seeking a “purely objective history” of philosophical or intellectual subjects are brought out well by Nietzsche, even if he strays to the opposite extreme in his solution, in On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. by P. Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980).