Announcing enrollment for our two Spring Seminars: Culture: More than Aesthetics and Thomistic Psychology: The Life of Thought.
Culture: More than Aesthetics
Thinking of art, we tend to think of the beautiful—and rightly so, for this, in some way, is to what all art aspires: if not directly, then indirectly, inasmuch as even the simple or the mundane may contribute to development of the beautiful. But obscured by this attention are the underlying realities of artistic creation, including the very nature of work as a transitive action of the human being, and how this action is undertaken.
Exploring its topic from a broadly Aristotelian-Thomistic perspective, this course will use the work of Jacques Maritain to probe the broader set of philosophical issues involved in the “philosophy of art”: ens artificiale, the nature of practical reason, the metaphysics of art-craft, and topics pertaining to philosophical aesthetics, considered primarily from the perspective of this metaphysical consideration of the domain of ens artificiale. Throughout our course, we will discover how questions of philosophical anthropology are in fact pivotally important for fashioning a metaphysics that is broad enough to account for the phenomenon of “being of art.”
In this seminar, originally delivered by Dr. Matthew Minerd (in this iteration being administered by Dr. Brian Kemple), we will explore the notion of work and art, of the artificial and the philosophical dimensions of creativity, through a close reading primarily of Jacques Maritain’s two works on the subject: Art and Scholasticism and Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry.
You may register for the seminar here: Culture: More than Aesthetics.
Thomistic Psychology: The Life of Thought
The human being is… a strange creature. We put on the blinders of familiarity and thereby often fail to see this oddity. It takes little reflection, however—small pause—to see how unlike we are to all other creatures. Some seem to think it belongs to one or another small difference: the way we use tools, the fact that we engage in play or ritual, that we are somehow a “symbolic species”. But all of these are only parts (or rather, consequences) of the fundamental difference: the human intellect. There is no living apart from being, and, as we will show, no thinking apart from living. We cannot understand human thinking apart from the context of human life, and we cannot understand human life apart from its immersion in being—an immersion not only of its substantial existence, but also its cognitive living.
In this seminar, we will explore the nature, functioning, and permeation of the intellectual difference throughout the entirety of human life, principally through the lens of Thomistic psychology. Topics include the operations of the intellect, the formation and development of concepts, and the integral union of intellectual and perceptual faculties and operations. In sum, we look to understand how the intellectual soul is the principle—that is, the ordering origin—of all that belongs to the human being.
This is an advanced seminar: you ought to at least have a decent familiarity with the issues covered in the Thomistic Psychology: A Retrieval seminar.
You may register for the seminar here: Thomistic Psychology: The Life of Thought.