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2024 Summer: Aristotle’s Physics

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Join us on an intellectually rigorous journey through Aristotle’s conception of physics as a scientific discipline in our upcoming Lyceum Institute Seminar. Why study the physics of an ancient thinker? One might think (and many do) Aristotle’s scientific work obsolesced by the discoveries of modernity. In truth, while he may have been mistaken in particular conclusions, the insights produced by the Stagyrite pass the test of time; and persisting in ignorance of them undermines much thinking today. Through this seminar, we will demonstrate the perennial merits of the Physics and bring to light essential truths concerning the study and understanding of nature.

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This study begins with a foundational examination of Aristotle’s logical methods, placing emphasis on discerning first principles, then turns to a structured analysis of pre-Socratic and Platonic challenges. With these preparations, participants will be primed to approach Aristotle’s Physics as proper hearers, equipped to grasp the profound depth of the Stagyrite’s scientific discourse in our rigorous examination of the scientific structure of the Physics.

It has often been a fault of philosophers—particularly in recent centuries, and sadly even among many who wish to retain the wisdom of tradition—that the natural world is not studied or understood, consigning its study to the sciences that investigate it through specialized means and instruments. But a philosophical grasp of nature is fruitful not only for the intellectual development of every individual: it is necessary for any scientist. Attaining insight into the meaning of natural phenomena cannot be achieved by the methods of modern science. Resolving their discovery into a coherent whole—seeing how the belong to the whole universe of experience—demands a higher study.

Challenge yourself. Registration closes June 6.

Schedule

Discussion Sessions

1:30pm ET
(World times)		Study Topics &
Readings
Week I
 
06/02–06/08		Aristotelian Science (ἐπιστήμη/episteme)
» Lecture 1: The Logical Method for Knowing Nature (φύσις/phusis) with Necessity
» Readings:
»» Aristotle: Topics I.5, 9; Categories 1-5; Posterior Analytics I.1-10, 13, 18, and II.1-14, 19; Physics I.1.
Week II
 
06/09–06/15		Change and Nature
» Lecture 2: The General Definition of Natural Beings as Changing (κινούμενα/kinoumena) and the Parmenidean Challenge (ἔλεγχος/elenchos)
» Readings:
»» Aristotle: Physics, I.2-4.
»» Parmenides: Truth (ἀλήθεια/aletheia).
Week III
 
06/16–06/22		Principles of Nature
» Lecture 3: The Principles (ἀρχαί/archai) of Nature (φύσις/phusis) & a Complete Response to the Parmenidean Challenge
» Readings:
»» Aristotle: Physics, I.5-9.
Week IV
 
06/23–06/29		Definition, Division, and Causes
» Lecture 4: The Definition of Nature, its Proper Division in the Sciences, and a general Account of Causes (αἴτιαι/aitiai) in Natural Demonstration
» Readings:
»» Aristotle: Physics, II.1-3, and 7.
BREAK
Week V
 
07/07–07/13		Chance and Necessity
» Lecture 5: On Chance (αὐτόματον/automaton) as a Per Accidens Cause, Necessarily Presupposing Natural Causal Purpose/Perfection/Completion (τέλος)
» Readings:
»» Aristotle: Physics, II.4-6.
Week VI
 
07/14–07/20		Teleological Necessity
» Lecture 6: On the Necessity of Nature as Teleological and on Natural Demonstration on the Hypothesis (ἐξ ὑποθέσεως/ex hupotheseos) of the End (τέλος)
» Readings:
»» Aristotle: Physics, II.7-9.
Week VII
 
07/21–07/27		Being in Motion
» Lecture 7: Motion, Place, Void, Time, and the Classification and Continuity of Movement
» Readings:
»» Aristotle: Physics, III-VI.
Week VIII
 
07/28–08/03		Unmoved Mover
» Lecture 8: The Last First Principle of Nature: The Primary Un-Moved Mover, Comprehending all Natural Being as the Cause of Motion and Existence
» Readings:
»» Aristotle: Physics, VII-VIII.

Registration

Lyceum Institute seminar costs are structured on a principle of financial subsidiarity. There are three payment levels, priced according to likely levels of income. If you wish to take a seminar but cannot afford the suggested rate, it is acceptable to sign up at a less-expensive level. The idea is: pay what you can. Those who can pay more, should, so that those who cannot pay as much, need not. Lyceum Institute members receive a further discount (see here for details).

One payment covers all 8 weeks.

If you prefer an alternative payment method (i.e., not PayPal), use our contact form and state whether you prefer to pay as a Participant, Patron, or Benefactor, and an invoice will be emailed to you.

Benefactor

[2024 Summer] Aristotle’s Physics – Public Benefactor

Recommended for those with fulltime employment in well-paying professions and sufficient resources to provide a little more.

$200.00

Patron

[2024 Summer] Aristotle’s Physics – Public Patron

Recommended for those in professions that do not pay as well as they ought and for whom continued education is especially important (including professors and clergy).

$135.00

Participant

[2024 Summer] Aristotle’s Physics – Public Participant

Recommended for those who are currently students or with part-time employment.

$60.00

Pricing Comparison

Standard priceBasic Lyceum
Enrollment		Advanced Lyceum EnrollmentPremium Lyceum Enrollment
Benefactor$200 per seminar$903 seminars included
$90 after		8 seminars included
$90 after
Patron$135 per seminar$653 seminars included
$65 after		8 seminars included
$65 after
Participant$60 per seminar$403 seminars included
$40 after		8 seminars included
$40 after
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News and Announcements/Philosophical Happy Hour

Evolution: Science, Religion, and the Truth

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Questions concerning the nature of evolution—questions which find their way into discourse time and again—have cropped up yet again. This post will make an effort to outline some of these issues, with view to fostering a fruitful discussion for our Philosophical Happy Hour (24 April 2024) on how we ought to think of evolution. It is probably best, however, if we begin with a definition of evolution.

While the theory of evolution finds itself applied most often and most successfully within the field of biology, it has been extended to describe the advent of any new form or diversity of being arising by a gradual process of change throughout the entire cosmos. As described by experts during the 1959 Darwin Centennial Celebration:

Evolution is definable in general terms as a one-way irreversible process in time, which during its course generates novelty, diversity, and higher levels of organization. It operates in all sectors of the phenomenal universe but has been most fully described and analyzed in the biological sector.

1960: Evolution after Darwin, 107; cited in Nogar 1963: The Wisdom of Evolution, 30.

Thus, “evolution” so-understood signifies not only the unfolding of life’s variation, but of the whole cosmos.

In a way, this turn in terminology—a century after Darwin’s Origin of Species—returns the word “evolution” to the broader (if yet-more-specifically-applied) meaning that it had prior to the 18th century: for the word, from Latin ex- (out, from) and volvere (to roll, and thus, a rolling-out or unrolling, unfolding), can be conceived as a general description. Yet this return obscures a certain confusion. For the most difficult problem of biological evolution—considered precisely as a scientific theory—consists in identifying the means by which evolution occurs. But presumably, the biological mechanisms affecting a diversity of species will not apply to the differentiation of gasses, solids, galaxies, stars and planets, and so on.

The following sections elaborate on some of the particularly controversial issues.

Evolution, Science, and Scientism

To attain clarity in our understanding of evolution, therefore, let us ask a few further questions. First: is biological evolution scientifically decided? Many today treat it as a given. (It has always struck me that the philosopher John Searle, in his 2009: Making the Social World on p.4 writes “We need to show how all the other parts of reality are dependent on, and in various ways derive from, the basic facts. For our purposes the two most fundamental sets of basic facts are the atomic theory of matter and the evolutionary theory of biology.”) This treatment, combined with ignorance of the actual mechanisms or complexities involved, situates evolution as a matter of ideology. It takes little thought to comprehend the significance of the progression of figures in the image below. It takes far more to grasp the supposed explanatory principles at work, as it were, in the gaps.

The Science of Evolution

That said, scientists across multiple disciplines have collected much evidence in support of the theory of evolution. For instance: the fossil record, genetic similarities across species (common ancestors); biogeographical differentiation (variation between species in Africa and the Galapagos, for instance); adaptive homologous structures (comparable structures like arms and wings adapted to diverse functions in different species), embryological similarities (there being, e.g., aquatic-functioning structures such as gill-slits in land-bound vertebrate creatures while in an embryonic state); and adaptive organistic responses (bacterial antibiotic resistance, finch beak sizes). Some of these are clear indications of genetic variation in DNA across generations (genotypic variation that is evolution proper); others of epigenetic differentiation in how species behave (phenotypic variation). The relations between these two forms of differentiation remain unclear.

Put otherwise, strong evidence for biological evolution exists. Yet the mechanisms of how it actually unfolds remain in hypotheses far from verification. We know that genotypic variation occurs through mutations in the DNA sequence during replication or through environmental factors. Sexual reproduction shuffles genetic material (“recombination”), especially notable when migrating populations become intermingled (“genetic flow”). The greater heterogeneity in the genetic constitution of a population, the more likely that population is to develop adaptively to the environment, and vice versa (“genetic drift”). Yet the precise interplay of these factors hides from our view.

The Ideological Appropriation of Evolution

Throughout the 20th century and into the first quarter of the 21st, anti-religious thinkers have used evolution as a cudgel against faith. To exemplify this ideological appropriation, we can consider the works of Richard Dawkins and (may he rest in peace), Daniel Dennett—two figures prominent in the so-called “New Atheism” movement.

Dawkins, most famous for his 2006 book, The God Delusion, extensively employs evolution within this work as an argument against belief in God. At the heart of this argument, one finds the idea of “natural selection”. Succinctly defined, natural selection is held as the process by which organisms having traits better suited to their environments are more likely to survive and reproduce, leading to gradual evolutionary adaptation over long stretches of time. For Dawkins, natural explanation functions as a narrative device explaining the complexity and diversity of the universe, and that, through this principle, small changes over a long enough time can lead to improbable conclusions.

Dennett in his 1995 Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, comparably, considers natural selection as a kind of “background algorithm” to life as a whole, explanatory not only of biological evolution but cultural development. The random variation of genetic differentiation, given enough iterations, leads to greater successes over time.

In both thinkers, we see an explanation of complex phenomena by the interaction of mere vires a tergo: in other words, “forces from the past”. As I will explain below, this relies upon a Procrustean limitation of causality. But for now, we can say that the vis a tergo evolutionary conception posits the universe as deterministic. Armed with a deterministic theory, these ideologues hammer away at the uniqueness and specialness of human beings and religious belief as efforts at escaping the inevitable material strictures of our existence.

Evolution, Religion, and Opposition

Dennett and Dawkins, along with their atheistic cohorts and followers, realize an old opposition and exacerbate a reactionary posture already present in those opposed to the idea of evolution.  That is, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as Theodosius Dobzhansky put it, “Darwin’s theory of evolution seemed to many… offensive to human dignity and incompatible with their religious faith.” (Foreword to Nogar 1963: The Wisdom of Evolution, 12.) The idea of a universal evolution, as applied in denial that the human being possesses a unique spiritual soul, denies that the human being is made in the image and likeness of God.

It is important to realize, however, that the scientific theory of evolution itself unfolded within what could be called a philosophically bankrupt time.  Between the dominance of modern nominalistic theories of knowledge and the 18th and 19th century rejections of Scholastic thinking in the university generally (and specifically among Protestants), reconciling the idea of evolution with religious faith seemed not only problematic, but near-impossible.  Faith and its practice, in other words, became increasingly constrained to a position of supposed “subjective” opinion. 

Because truth cannot contradict truth, the apparent irreconcilability of belief in the literal truth of revelation and the theory of evolution led to believers outright denying the latter.  Some, such as Ken Ham or Henry Morris, adhere to the position that any purported science in contradiction to literal interpretations of scripture are, de facto, inaccurate.  Others, such as Michael Behe or William Dembski, advocate for intelligent design as an alternative, claiming that the evident complexity of the cosmos requires a cause independent of that cosmos itself. 

Within the Catholic tradition, Fr. Chad Ripperger authored a treatise on The Matphysics of Evolution: Evolutionary Theory in Light of First Principles which, taking up Aristotelian principles (see more below) argues that not only theological considerations but also philosophical ones contradict the theory of evolution.  For decades, the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation has dedicated itself to dismantling evolution as a theory inimical to faith.

The Origins of Man

As aforementioned, the central difficulty concerns the development of the human being.  Long has it been the orthodox view of all Christian believers that God directly infuses the spiritual soul of the human person at conception, and that this infusion alone suffices to explain our uniquely spiritual mode of existence.  The theory of evolution, which explains the development of the human as a consequence of genetic mutations from simpler to more complex forms of life, proceeding through the line of primates and eventually resulting in homo sapiens, seems to contradict this Christian understanding.

Even the most ardent students of evolution must admit (so long as they are not caught in a converse ideology) that the evidence heretofore collected does not demonstrate such a development to have happened.  At best, it indicates its possibility.  That many of the remains purportedly demonstrating links between lower primates and advanced forms of human bodies have been proven hoaxes or mistakes undermines confidence in the theory as well.  Indeed, the empirical evidence—as is always the case—never demonstrates its own meaning, but always requires interpretation.  Under or through what narratives are we to understand the things we see and discover?

Interpretation and the Weaponization of Theory

On the one hand, we touch here upon matters clearly beyond our scope—such as, “how may one interpret the creation narratives of Sacred Scripture?”  On the other hand, we ought to note that opposition to theories proposed by modern science stemming from their contradiction to faith is to put the sources of revelation at odds with one another.  Thinkers like Dawkins and Dennett posit the same opposition, from the other side: opposing faith because it contradicts their senses.  If we accept the terms of this opposition we are condemned to choose a side, and, choosing a side, to divide and fragment our cosmos.

Others who have attempted to affect a cohesion between the science of evolution and faith in creation—including controversial figures like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ or Raymond Nogar, OP—have been met with criticism from both sides.  A figure seen as heterodox by either force will be grouped by them with the opposition and therefore seldom heard.  Those proposing a third way, most often, are challenging figures.

But such a challenge proves today most necessary.  So easily do many become seized in ideological commitments without realization.  Those held by opposed ideologies do naught to break this grasp, but, rather—for the most part—only strengthen it.

Evolution, Truth, and Aristotelian Philosophy

The resolution of this difficulty, it seems to me, can only be attained through a genuine philosophical habit.  (Note that a resolution of the difficulty is not the same as the solution to a problem.)  Most especially, we appear in want of a deeper and improved understanding of causality.  Those who weaponize evolution against faith do so with a Procrustean notion of causality: accepting only one kind of causal relation, namely, that between the efficient and the material.  Evacuating causality of the formal and final sets the debate in terms inescapably in their favor. But our understanding of any phenomenon, bereft of a full causal schema, proves incomplete.

By contrast, some—such as Fr. Ripperger—attempt rigorously to employ an Aristotelian causal model in denying the possibility of evolution.  Invoking principles of sufficient reason, proportionate causality, and finality, Fr. Ripperger argues that the notion is philosophically inadmissible from the Aristotelian-Thomistic perspective.  The first two—sufficient reason and proportionate causality—appear most central to his objection. 

Succinctly stated, these are, first, the principle that a sufficient reason must be established to explain how any thing (whether a separate being or an intrinsic principle) is responsible for another.  For instance, if a weak tap against a wooden wall results in the collapse of the wall, one will look for another cause—the tap being insufficiently forceful—and thus discover termite damage.  Second, proportionate causality holds that an effect cannot be greater than its cause.  If I throw a ball and it moves at a velocity greater than the force transferred to it by my arm, we would have to discover some other cause responsible for this.

Principles of Causality

Applying these two principles in argument against evolution does not prove difficult: how can a lesser prior generation give rise to a posterior generation which is greater (i.e., evolutionary development denied by proportionate causality)?  And how can a specifying form not in a prior generation come to arise in a later (i.e., speciation denied by sufficient reason)?

But this opinion, too, consists in a certain interpretation: not only of what Aristotle and St. Thomas mean in their conceptions of essence, existence, substance, accident, species, form, final cause, and so on, but also of the realities signified by these conceptions.  More poignantly, his conception of causality appears rather narrow: not only with respect to the specification of form but also with respect to the force of the final.  Put in other words, Fr. Ripperger no less than Dawkins or Dennett considers the theory of evolution solely on grounds of the vires a tergo.  He limits final causality to a thing’s pursuit of formal perfection. Likewise, he limits formal causality to the intrinsic and primarily substantial essence of things.

Questions to Pursue

This post could be expanded a hundredfold quite easily (but for the constraints of time).  But hopefully it has illustrated some of the difficulty that stands in need of resolution.  As such, we would like to propose the following questions for discussion:

  1. Does Aristotelian philosophy necessarily oppose the theory of evolution?  Are the principles of sufficient reason or proportionate causality genuinely opposed to the theory?
  2. Can facts definitively establish the truth or falsity of evolutionary theory?
  3. What is form as a principle of life?  How is form transferred from one generation to the next?  In what ways does material receptivity affect this generational transference of form?
  4. Do we need a more robust understanding of causality to interpret the proposed mechanisms of evolutionary development in light of Aristotelian philosophical principles?

We are open to these questions branching out into other areas!  Please join us this Wednesday.

Philosophical Happy Hour

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Come join us for drinks (adult or otherwise) and a meaningful conversation. Open to the public! Held every Wednesday from 5:45–7:15pm ET.

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News and Announcements/Philosophical Happy Hour

Science and Philosophy: In Dialogue?

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Positivism and Science

A difficult and complex question in philosophy today concerns the discussion regarding the intersection and “boundaries” of the harder empirical sciences and the distinct activity of philosophical enquiry.  Given the success of scientific discovery, one temptation in the early 20th century was to claim that disciplines such as biology, chemistry, physics, and the like were (or would eventually become) exhaustive for understanding the world and nature.  This position, known as “positivism”, claimed that genuine inquiry into the world of nature either had to be reducible to empirical testing and measuring or was known to be true tautologically.[1]  Anything that did not conform to these modes of inquiry, such as classical metaphysics and theology, were considered pseudo-scientific in their mode of enquiry.  

Standing in contrast to this reductive position, the French Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain argues in his Degrees of Knowledge that a bifurcation can be made between sciences as affirmative, to which he ascribes the empirical “hard” sciences and studies, and the more deductive science of proper “explication” or knowledge of and from first principles:[2]

Briefly, we can say that science in general deals with the necessities immanent in natures, with the universal essences realized in individuals in the concrete and sensible world.  The distinction has been drawn between the explicatory or deductive sciences, which attain to these natures by discovery (constructively in mathematics, and from without to what is within in the case of philosophy), and the affirmative or inductive sciences, which only attain these natures as signs and substitutes, blindly so to say.  These latter have assuredly a certain explicative value, without which they would not be sciences, but which consists in indicating the necessities of things by way of sensible experiment, not by assigning their intelligible reasons.

Maritain’s distinction between the two sciences of the “explicatory” and the “affirmative” does not distinguish entities as they exist in the world, but rather between different ways of grasping entities in the world.  It is this distinction that forms the basis of Maritain’s own investigation and his defense against positivism: namely, the three degrees of abstraction (by which we attain the natures of physical objects, mathematical objects, and metaphysical objects).  Even so, if all Maritain has done here is provide room for a study of metaphysics or a natural philosophy based upon principles, there remains the question as to how the two modes of enquiry interact with one another—if at all.  Are the affirmative sciences corrective of the explicatory?  Do the explicatory sciences have their own interpretive autonomy in relation to what can be measured and analyzed empirically?

The Cenoscopic and Idioscopic

Another distinction made in philosophy, taken first from Jeremy Bentham, but developed by C. S. Peirce is the distinction between cenoscopic and idioscopic sciences. The cenoscopic sciences are characterized by their study of what is common among the many and divergent, and the idioscopic is characterized by the specializing or the breaking apart of inquiry:[3]

In cenoscopy, things escape the eye not by being hidden by virtue of their tininess or hugeness, or their extension over eons of time or involvement in hyper-complexities of culture, but simply by their commonness. Their very obviousness requires a conscious direction of our attention, like that needed to notice the ticking of a clock that your ears were hearing all the while you conversed with someone, but which remained unperceived because you were otherwise occupied…The “idioscopic,” by contrast, is a “look” that is idios – “singular, special(ized)” – and that began to be cultivated in earnest only in modern times. It has become the very glory of modern science, and has brought countless blessings and maledictions into our contemporary biosphere.

Whereas cenoscopy offers us a “grand theory of everything” and seeks to unite the divergent modes of enquiry, idioscopic enquiry by its nature seeks to break apart, to isolate, to experiment upon, and to measure.  Neither science is necessarily wrongheaded in what it seeks to inquire, but both are deficient with regards to understanding the world and how we relate to it:[4]

In summary, these four areas of human knowing – the astronomically big and the microscopically small, the biologically compounded and the culturally complex – invite idioscopic science to don its instruments, mount its experiments, measure and hypothesize about the objects in question, and finally to fashion technologies that will hopefully more deeply integrate humankind with its environment, solve problems and cure diseases.  Still, the great ideal at the heart of all knowledge, namely, the desire to unify data and bring synthesis to multiplicity, floats temptingly over these four areas as it does over the divisions within each of them.  Knowledge by definition tends toward unity.

What philosophy offers the idioscopic (here I’m grafting roughly onto Maritain’s affirmative as roughly equivalent) is a unified whole of the diversity in the hard sciences.  While idioscopic science by its nature compartmentalizes and divides the study of the world, rightfully so within its respective subject-matter, it is at a loss in attempting to find unity within the multitude.  By contrast, the cenoscopic, in providing its own accounts and studies of the world based upon shared commonness, oftentimes misses the mark in its enquiry—one could think of the Eleatic philosophers and their cenoscopic inquiry concluding the impossibility of change and mutation and the eternal permanence to being.

A Habit Formed

Famously in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle quipped that among the commonly identified virtutes, many of them go unnamed.  A virtue famously for Aristotle is taken to be a mean between two vicious extremes, being informed by the goods sought after deficiently or in excess in both vices:[5]

So, virtue, is a purposive disposition, lying in a mean that is relative to us and determined by a rational principle, and by that which a prudent man would use to determine it.  It is a mean between two kinds of vices, one of excess and the other of deficiency; and also, for this reason, that whereas these vices fall short of or exceeding the right measure in both feelings and actions, virtue discovers the mean and chooses it.

The question I would like to ask is: what sort of “unnamed” virtue must a person be formed in today if both the cenoscopic and ideoscopic sciences are to be retained?  Is it healthy to siphon off one habit of cognizing the world in the absence of the other?  Are there points where both scientific inquiries intersect, or one ought to claim priority, and if so, is there a habit needed to secure this intersection?  If there can be found such a habit, what kind of vicious extremes could be seen to impede the exercise of such a virtuous inquiry?

Join the Conversation!

We’ll be discussing these and more conversations in our Philosophical Happy Hour this Wednesday (17 April 2024) and we’d love for you to join. Use the links below!

Philosophical Happy Hour

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Come join us for drinks (adult or otherwise) and a meaningful conversation. Open to the public! Held every Wednesday from 5:45–7:15pm ET.

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[1] Creath 2022: “Logical Empiricism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.).

[2] Maritain 1937: Distinguer pour unir ou Les degrés du savoir. Reference to the English translation by Bernard Wall, Degrees of Knowledge, 43

[3] Paine 2021: “On the Cenoscopic and Idioscopic and Why They Matter”, in Reality: a journal for philosophical discourse, online [PDF]: 5-6.

[4] Ibid, 12.

[5] c.335/34bc: Ἠθικὰ nικοάχεια in the English translation by J. Thomson, The Nicomachean Ethics, 42.

News and Announcements/Seminar

2024 Spring: Philosophers and History

In the forthcoming seminar, we present an in-depth philosophical examination of history, inspired by Etienne Gilson’s proposition that the History of Philosophy is analogous to a laboratory for chemists and biologists. The seminar proposes an exploration into the idea that history is not merely a chronological record but a spatial and present reality, as exemplified by the history written in the stars. This perspective challenges the traditional view of the past as a distant, inert collection of events, suggesting instead that it is a dynamic and present force in our lives.

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The seminar aims to cultivate a robust philosophical methodology for understanding human time and history. It addresses the complexity of chronology as an inherent aspect of humanity, engaging with theological concepts of salvation history and critically assessing modern ideologies like Hegelianism, Marxism, and various postmodernist movements. These ideologies, which often attempt to transcend or reinterpret historical narratives, will be examined for their implications on understanding history.

Can there be a science of history? Aristotle rather famously denied this—but if we believe, with St. Augustine, that an intelligible rationale synchronically permeates the cosmos, it stands to reason that meaning may be found also in the diachronic unfolding of the centuries. That our interpretations of this diachronic unfolding themselves often conflict does not undermine that intelligibility; rather, such conflict should drive us to dig deeper.

The initial sessions will focus on fundamental concepts such as the nature of motion, change, and time, along with the roles of tradition, transmission, and translation. This will set the stage for discussions on human freedom versus determinism, and the unique historical nature of human beings.

Further, the seminar will delve into the faculty of memory, drawing from St. Augustine and Eastern philosophies, to better understand the shaping of historical perception. Subsequently, different paradigms of interpreting historical change—the linear vs. cyclical, the Great Protagonists vs. the longue durée—the relationship between history and myth, and the examination of various modern approaches to history (in, e.g., Hegel, Darwin, Spengler, Vico, Rosenstock-Huessy, and others) will be key topics of discussion.

Concluding with an analysis of the Abrahamic traditions, the seminar will explore the unique commonality of these religions in their capacity for not only articulating but embodying their historical narratives. This scholarly seminar invites participants to engage in a comprehensive and critical exploration of time, history, and the human experience within it.

All texts for this course will be provided in PDF.  The seminar will be conducted remotely through Microsoft Teams. Learn more about our seminars here. Discussions will be held each Saturday. Early access to the platform begins on 16 March 2024. Deadline to register is 4 April 2024. Download the Syllabus for more details.

Schedule – topics and readings not yet complete

Discussion Sessions

10:00am ET
(World times)		Study Topics &
Readings
April 61. Time: the Measure of Motion and the Motor of History in the Three Migrations of Tradition, Transmission and Translation
Readings:
» [Primary] John M. Quinn.  The Doctrine of Time in St. Thomas, Literary Licensing, 2013 [1959] 17-43; A.K. Coomaraswamy.  Time and Eternity, “Introduction,” Artibus Asiae, 1947, 1-7.
» [Secondary] Quinn, ibidem, 1-16; Coomaraswamy, Time and Eternity, V. “Christian and Modern,” 105-140. 
April 132. Freedom, Personhood and Creation in History
Readings:
» [Primary] Vernon Bourke.  Will in Western Thought, Sheed & Ward, “What Does Will Mean?”, 1964, 5-27.  Jacques Maritain.  The Thomist Idea of Freedom, PDF.
» [Secondary] Norris Clarke.  Being and Person, Marquette, 1958; P-M Emonet.  The Greatest Marvel of Nature, Crossroads, 2000, 14-23.  S.R. Paine.  “Scholia on an Implicit Person,” parts 1 and 2: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oqMNOO–mKk3ADaDh1OSHOwlcR6cV8Hj/view
April 203. Memory: the “Great Harbor” (Aug.) – on Hearing and Remembering
Readings:
» [Primary] St. Augustine.  Confessions, bk. X
» [Secondary] Todd Breyfogle.  “Memory and Imagination in Augustine’s Confessions”, PDF.
April 274. History: Cycles or Stories?  Protagonists or Currents?
Readings:
» [Primary].  Mircea Eliade.  Cosmos and History, U. of Chicago, 1949, 147-162.
» [Secondary] Huston Smith.  “Hope, Yes; Progress, No,” from Forgotten Truth, Harper, 1992 [1976] 118-145.
May 4BREAK
May 115. History and Myth
Readings:
» [Primary] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution.  “Articulating Periods and Coordinating Memories,” Berg, 1969, 689-707.
» [Secondary] Norman Fiering.  “Heritage vs. History: ERH as a “Physician of Memory,” from Understanding Rosenstock-Huessy, 60-93.
May 186. Vis-à-vis the Sciences – History and the Irreducible
Readings:
» [Primary] Gianbattista Vico; Georg Hegel; Karl Marx
» [Secondary] Spengler, Toynbee, McNeil, Hayden White
May 257. Big History, Deep History and Other Idioscopic Ventures
Readings:
[Primary]
[Secondary]
June 18. The Only Scripture That Tells a Story
Readings:
[Primary].  From St. Augustine.  City of God, ….
[Secondary]

Registration is Closed

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Enrollment		Advanced Lyceum EnrollmentPremium Lyceum Enrollment
Benefactor$200 per seminar$903 seminars included
$90 after		8 seminars included
$90 after
Patron$135 per seminar$653 seminars included
$65 after		8 seminars included
$65 after
Participant$60 per seminar$403 seminars included
$40 after		8 seminars included
$40 after
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Science & Engineering

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Ask most people today what we mean by “science” and the answers will vary, but commonly include that it is: empirical, experimental, authoritative, highly specialized, the result of intensive training, and concerned with discoveries that are precise, accurate, and actionable. One also finds the word frequently paired with “technology”—as well as “engineering” and “mathematics” (STEM).

While we at the Lyceum aim to develop a philosophical study of technology, and have been internally exploring discussions about mathematics, today we seek to question the nature of engineering and to bring greater clarity to its relationship with science. For, despite their ubiquity in our world today, few people, it seems, truly understand either. Allow us, therefore, to give this brief primer for our Happy Hour discussion to be held this Wednesday, 2/21/2024. We are picking up the thread from last week, when we discussed the relationship between expertise and wisdom.

Science: Specialized Knowledge

Most people today view science as a meticulous and empirical pursuit, grounded in observation and experimentation. We esteem “science” for its authoritative and specialized knowledge, and view it as the bedrock of the technological advancements that improve the material conditions of our lives. Central to its approach is the experimental methodology, where controlled experiments play a crucial role in testing hypotheses. (Indeed, many people, when pressed to provide a definition of science, will simply point to this method.)

This pursuit utilizes emphasizes quantitative precision, with a strong emphasis on accurate measurements to validate theories. Underpinning this all is a culture of skepticism, supposedly encouraging continuous questioning and refinement. Thus, modern science appears as a systematic, “evidence-based” endeavor, deeply intertwined with technology and specialized expertise, constantly evolving through rigorous scrutiny and empirical validation. To many, “science” and “knowledge” are synonyms.

Common Conception of Engineering

Engineering can be described as a practical discipline that intersects with the sciences and mathematics. It is commonly held to apply scientific knowledge and mathematical principles for creative problem-solving and innovation. While ostensibly governed by scientific theories and mathematical accuracy, engineering often operates in the realm of approximations and practical intuition, making it distinct from and not necessarily reliant upon the theoretical purity of sciences. It is, moreover, a field where theoretical concepts from science are transformed into tangible, real-world applications, and for this reason is highly-valued outside academia.

Where science conceives problems and explores experiments concerning them, engineering produces the means for their solution. Engineers may not possess the abstract and theoretical knowledge of scientists. But, perhaps more importantly, they abound in pragmatic “know-how”.

Re-Conceiving the Paradigms of Science & Engineering

Despite the common acceptance of these two descriptions, one can perhaps see that something doesn’t quite fit right. Something divides the two fields. And although that divide admits of a bridge, we have to ask: what causes this divide? Why does theoretical conception belong on one side and practical application on another? Why is it the case that engineers often, without insight or oversight from theoretical science, discovers and applies practically intuited solutions? How does the scientific method provide the insight engineers supposedly require? What separates the vision of the two?

Could a fundamentally-short-sighted conception of science be the reason for the divide? Have we been operating under a false notion of what science is all our lives? What are the consequences, if so?

And what, for that matter, do we mean by a “practically intuited solution”? How does engineering arrive at these? What does this “practical intuition” say about engineering’s relation to science?

One thing is certain: the current conceptions of science and engineering do not conduce to a respect for wisdom but rather the development and maintenance of technocracy. Evidence for this truth abounds. Practitioners of science and engineering alike commonly aim at improved control over the material world. But do they know how to ask why?

The Orders of Knowledge and Action

We hope you will join us this Wednesday! Links are below for the mailing list (or to join directly—you need only use a real first name). To help structure our discussion, here are some questions to contemplate:

  1. Reconceiving Roles: In what ways can the roles of science and engineering be redefined or reimagined to support a society that values wisdom and cenoscopic understanding over technocratic efficiency?
  2. Infusing Wisdom into the “Scientific World”: Can the principles of cenoscopic science, focused on universal truth and philosophical inquiry, be integrated into the practices of engineering and idioscopic science?
  3. Practical vs. Theoretical: What do we mean in dividing these two off from one another? How can there be fields of “practical knowledge” or “intuition” in contrast to “theoretical knowledge”?
  4. Educational Shifts: What changes in education and training for scientists and engineers might instill a broader, more cenoscopic understanding of their work’s impact on culture?

Philosophical Happy Hour

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On Modern Science and Sacred Traditions

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“Religion is anti-science.”  Jerry Coyne, Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, once wrote the following:

I’ll construe “science” as the set of tools we use to find truth about the universe, with the understanding that these truths are provisional rather than absolute.  These tools include observing nature, framing and testing hypotheses, trying your hardest to prove that your hypothesis is wrong to test your confidence that it’s right, doing experiments and above all replicating your and others’ results to increase confidence in your inference.

And I’ll define religion as does philosopher Daniel Dennett: “Social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.” Of course many religions don’t fit that definition, but the ones whose compatibility with science is touted most often – the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – fill the bill.

“Yes, there is a war between science and religion”, The Conversation, 21 December 2018

These two definitions, as Coyne puts it, construe incompatible ways of viewing the world.  Arguably, however, these are very bad ways of defining both religion and science.  Neither gets after something essential, but aims, instead, at a kind of generalized amalgamation.  Coyne goes on from these dubious definitions to argue that religion provides no good reasons or evidence for its claims, but requires unreasoning faith, whereas science employs an empirical method of inquiry that can result in “confident inferences”.

1. Reconciling Sources

Debating Coyne’s unserious and weak assertions (and understanding) is not our purpose, here, however.  His—and generally other “new atheist” objections (which smack of intellectual insecurity; what else could so philosophically-bereft minds feel, when facing philosophically-dependent questions?)—instead serve to raise a point: how should we understand science, and, with that, its compatibility with religion and sacred traditions?

The hermeneutic question of interpreting different sources for truth—the books of nature and of revelation—has long been asked by none other than religiously-minded figures themselves.  On its own, asking this hermeneutic question is itself a kind of scientific inquiry.  For we must recognize that what often goes by the name “science” today—or “modern science”—is but one dependent branch on the tree of human understanding.  To this end, Jeremy Bentham (of all people!) once felicitously proposed the terms “idioscopic” and “cenoscopic” to distinguish between the methods used in “modern science” and the philosophically-geared methods of discovery.  Fr. Scott Randall Paine has an extensive and wonderful essay on the distinction available here.  In short, the idioscopic specializes its vision to discern things indiscernible otherwise; while the cenoscopic utilizes the common reasoning capacities of the human being to resolve discoveries into a coherent whole.  Regarding idioscopy as alone the tree upon which knowledge grows (cutting that branch off and sticking it in the ground, as it were) has borne sickly intellectual fruits.  “Modern science”, divorced from the humanities, arts, philosophy, religion and theology—all the domains of cenoscopic inquiry—leaves us with an unresolved picture of the world.

But modern science alone does not cause this separation.

1. Scripture and Science

Commenting upon the modern philosophical rejection of the textually-commentarial tradition of Scholasticism, John Deely writes in a lengthy footnote:

Although sometimes I wonder to what extent this objection of the times, apparently directed against the Aristotelian philosophers, a safe target, is not the more intended for the unsafe target of the theologians, who in fact have always been the far more culpable in this area from the earliest Christian times.  I think of such examples as that of Cosmas Indicopleustes with his Christian Topography (Alexandria, i.535–47ad), “in which he refutes the impious opinion that the earth is a globe”, for “the Christian geography was forcibly extracted from the texts of scripture, and the study of nature was the surest symptom of an unbelieving mind.  The orthodox faith confined the habitable world to one temperate zone, and represented the earth as an oblong surface, four hundred days’ journey in length, two hundred in breadth, encompassed by the ocean, and covered by the solid crystal of the firmament” (Gibbon 1788).  But examples of equal or greater offensiveness can easily be culled from every tradition of sacred, “revealed” texts, both before and outside of the Christian development.  Surely, within the Christian era, one of the more outstanding examples of hermeneutic abuse is the career of the “blessed” Robert Cardinal Bellarmine (1542–1621) who, well in advance of the most famous trials over which he held sway (in 1600 that of Bruno, in 1616 that of Copernicus’ work, laying the ground for the 1633 condemnation of Galileo), had arrived through scriptural study at a detailed cosmology which he regarded as “virtually revealed”.  These astonishing results he recorded between 1570 and 1572 in his unpublished Commentary on Qq. 65-74 of Aquinas c.1266 [Summa theologiae, prima pars], autographs which we may hope will one day be brought to full publication (Baldini and Coyne 1984 [“The Louvain Lectures of Bellarmine and the Autograph Copy of his 1616 Declaration to Galileo”] is barely a start) to add to the many object-lessons still resisted that make up the ending of the “Galileo Affair”: see Blackwell 1991 [Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Church] esp. 40–45, 104–06 (on the truth of the Bible even in trivial matters being guaranteed as Bellarmine put it, ex parte dicentis – “because of God being the one who says so”).  Too bad Galileo, writing in 1615 with Bellarmine in mind as well as still alive (see Blackwell 1991: 274), felt constrained to leave unpublished his observation that “those who try to refute and falsify [propositions about the physical world] by using the authority of… passages of Scripture will commit the fallacy called ‘begging the question’.  For since the true sense of the Scripture will already have been put in doubt by the force of the argument, one cannot take it as clear and secure for the purpose of refuting the same proposition.  Rather one needs to take the demonstrations apart and find their fallacies with the aid of other arguments, experiences, and more certain observations.  And when the truth of fact and of nature has been found in this way, then, but not before, can we confirm the true sense of Scripture and securely use it for our purposes.  Thus again the secure path is to begin with demonstrations, confirming the true and refuting the false”.  This lesson applies across the cultures to every group that draws upon texts deemed revealed, not in every case, indeed, but wherever arise questions that can be investigated and resolved by means of natural investigations, scientific or philosophical.

Deely 2002: What Distinguishes Human Understanding, 57-58n13.

While I generally agreed with my mentor on many things, I find his objections (and dismissive attitude) toward Bellarmine problematic.  Yet—I must admit a hesitation here.  There seems to be a valid objection to the hermeneutic used often still today by Biblical literalists; one which attempts to conform an understanding of the physical world to an already-determined interpretation of Scripture’s meaning, rather than to understand Scripture’s revelations about the natural world through an understanding of that world itself.  Study of the natural world responds to our human thirst for knowledge, and, nourished in the proper context of a holistic human learning, enlivens the soul.  To constrain it under the bounds of a Scriptural interpretation itself question does, indeed, beg the principle.

3. Universal Hermeneutics of Continuity

Can we resolve the diverse sources of knowledge into a coherent whole?  How?  How should we interpret Scripture and science as parts of one continuous whole for human knowledge?  Join us this evening (and perhaps again in the future!) to discuss.

Philosophical Happy Hour

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A Philosophical Inquiry into Facts

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What is a fact? The English word, used so commonly throughout the modern world, comes from its Latin cognate, factum: an event, occurrence, a deed, an achievement. But since the mid-17th century, under the auspices of the Enlightenment’s so-called “empiricism”, the word has been taken to be a “reality” known as independent of observation. The fact is Absolute. Facts, therefore, are discovered by and studied within “science”. They are “objective”. They are “verifiable”. That water at sea level boils at 212° Fahrenheit; that Columbus arrived in the New World in 1492; that Chicago is west of New York: most people regard these as facts.

Other claims may be disputed, such as that Jesus Christ rose from the dead; or that Domingo de Soto was the first to introduce the distinction between formal and instrumental signs. These disputes hinge upon the evidence: given the right data, it is thought, we could decide definitively one way or another. Other claims are not disputed as to their factuality, but regarded as irresoluble to facts. For instance, the claim that socialism is evil, or that capitalism drives moral flaw; that Aquinas was a better philosopher than Wittgenstein, or that a particular pope has undermined the Catholic faith.

Pseudo-Philosophical Presuppositions

This bifurcation into what is or is not a fact, however, presupposes much. Arguments often appeal to facts (or “evidence”). Arguments structured through or upon factual bases typically appear stronger. Contrariwise, if someone lacks a factual basis for his argument, others will regard that argument as “subjective”, a matter of opinion, and therefore as weak. To give an example, consider the claim that socialism is evil. The commonest way to defend this claim consists in examining facts about the Soviet Union. We advance the argument by pointing to the number of people killed, or the churches destroyed. We look at the facts of the Gulag. The Soviets themselves did all they could to hide these facts from much of the world.

Curiously enough, however, the Soviets (at least those making the decisions), despite their efforts to hide the facts did not seem overly troubled by them. Indeed: commonly, “facts” seem themselves always embedded in social contexts of interpretation. Bruno Latour has argued that what we regard as “facts” are not mind-independent truths discovered through science but socially-constructed fictions premised upon some observation. That is: circumstances and instruments, as well as often-tacit social agreements, contextualize every purported discovery of “fact”.

Discussing the Philosophical Reality of “Facts”

Yet the idea of the “fact”, despite such challenges, remains powerful in our contemporary social imaginary. Facts, as oft-repeated by a certain fast-talking pundit, do not care about your feelings.

But, we have to ask—we ought to ask—is there even really such a thing as a “fact”? What makes something to be a fact? How do we discover them, share them, interpret them? Can we gain “factual knowledge” without interpretation?

Join us this evening to discuss facts—and philosophy!

Philosophical Happy Hour

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Philosophy

On Education and Its Institutions

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The contemporary controversy concerning education centers around the institutions tasked with providing it.  We ask ourselves what curricula should be implemented, what teaching methods are most effective, and how governmental agencies can assist in the growth of educational institutions—we debate the morality of teachers and their influence, the rights to speech and questioning, the difficulty of grading and assessment and so on and on.  All too rarely, especially as these disputes intensify, do we pause to question our presuppositions concerning the true nature and purpose of education itself.  Indeed: long is it overdue that we turn our gaze away from the institutional structure and instead towards the individual, the family, and especially the parents who themselves are not only the first teachers of their children, but who ought to teach them always—who ought to be models from which their children learn throughout life.

This is not to deny the necessity of educational institutions—not only as pragmatic necessities for parents who cannot afford to homeschool but also for higher learning of every kind.  Yet, though necessary, institutions will always be insufficient.  We cannot outsource or offload the responsibility for education to any institution or collection of institutions.  Institutions are lenses that help bring clarity and focus; but they are not the light.

Real Education

Education, as any experienced educator knows, consists in guiding rather than informing; in fostering the right questions rather than the correct answers.  Intellectual nourishment, however, requires a holistic approach.  Going to the gym five days a week will do relatively little for one’s health if all other hours of the day are marked by constant consumption of junk food and buttery baked goods.  So too, the best teaching in school cannot eradicate contrary examples given at home—nor, for that matter, should this be required.  For the student to see his parents’ leisure hours consumed whole by television or distractions encourages inheritance of the same infertile habit.  Every human being signifies to every other not only through words and actions, but by the virtues and vices cultivated in one’s person.  We not only think through signs; we are ourselves symbols, signifiers of the truths and goods in which we believe, shown through our actions.

Thus, we must reorient our perspective on education: the foundation—the first symbol by which its merit is conveyed to the child and spread throughout the culture—cannot be found in the institution but rather only within the household and particularly in parents aflame with their own love for wisdom and learning.  This love becomes a first spark in the lives of children—to be focused and brightened by the lenses of educational institutions.  But they can neither start nor maintain that fire.

Communal Lights

This love of learning and discovery passed from parent to child need not be of abstruse topics—neither metaphysics nor science, theological controversy nor philosophical dialectic—but can be rooted in the very life of the home: in the tradition of family, in the cultivation of land, in the play of language through story and invention.  Principally, this love must kindle the natural desire to know, that sits at the heart of every human being.  That parents may seek development of their own higher education, of course, serves all the better, for this demonstrates that learning not only satisfies curiosity or amusement, but that it requires discipline, and that this discipline earns the soul richer rewards. 

By showing this intellectual discipline to children—and, indeed, one’s whole community—the parent (or even the unmarried and childless adult) exposes the lie that education after childhood constitutes a mere hobby or pastime.  At the Lyceum Institute we aim to provide a digital community which supports this continued pursuit of learning—as, indeed, education always is enriched by being shared with others.  In fact, no education occurs alone; it is handed down by ourselves and by others and flourishes thereby, through books and records of findings and thought.  But a living engagement takes it further: brings it into the life possible only through conversation, through disputation, through real questioning. Community, structured by an institution, helps shape the lens through which the lights of learning shine brighter.

We would love for you to join us.

Liberal Arts/News and Announcements

Art of Rhetoric I: Discovery of Arguments

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“…it is strange if it is a shameful thing not to be able to come to one’s own aid with one’s body but not a shameful thing to do so by means of argument, which is to a greater degree a human being’s own than is the use of the body.”

Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, 1355a 40—1355b 3.

The nature and function of rhetoric have both long been matters of controversy, even among classical and like-minded authors. We find the reason for this controversy in the complex relationality of orator and audience: for each is ordered to an object, and the correspondence of such order a matter necessarily complex. That is, persuasion—with which rhetoric is concerned—concerns a myriad of relations. The rhetorician aims to bring these relations into alignment. Rhetoric as a study concerns first the discovery of the means of such alignment and, second, their application.

Discovering the means requires keen awareness of the instruments suitable for this task. In persuasion, we attempt to change another’s beliefs. That is, we attempt to convince another of the truth of some proposition so as to act in accordance with that truth when the occasion occurs. If we are corrupt, we will do so with disregard to that propositions’ truth ourselves. If we are righteous, we will seek the clear exposition of that truth. But before we can affect such exposition, we must be clear-sighted ourselves. Attaining such clarity is the goal of this, the first of two Art of Rhetoric courses offered at the Lyceum Institute.

Overall Course Structure

This course—as but one of eight courses in our Trivium program—is not intended to be taken as a standalone pursuit but integrated with the other arts. There are no prerequisites to our study of Rhetoric I: Discovery of Arguments, although it is encouraged that students begin with Grammar I: Foundations and Logic I: Basics of Argumentation.

The Art of Rhetoric I: Discovery of Arguments is 8 weeks long, with one brief recorded lecture and two recorded discussion sessions each week.  Each discussion session is structured around readings of Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric, Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, and Edward Corbett’s textbook, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, with supplements and examples drawn from elsewhere in the tradition.  Our study within discovery will attend primarily to the works of Aristotle and Corbett.  Participants are expected to have read the assigned reading and listened to the lecture prior to the session, so that they may engage in a semi-structured discussion directed and moderated by the instructor and ask insightful questions about language and its use.  Moreover, continual discussion will foster that participation and engagement throughout the week.  Participants will be expected to partake in these discussions on a regular basis and will be challenged to do so directly.

download the syllabus for details

Weekly Structure

Each week there will also be a 15 to 45-minute audio or video lecture, posted to Teams at the beginning of the week.  This lecture will be based upon the assigned reading, but will also stray into related topics, or may use the reading as a launching point for addressing some related issue (perhaps one more general, or perhaps one more specific). 

Though elements of the study of rhetoric can occur asynchronously—there being countless examples wherein we may encounter it on our own—discussions are nevertheless crucial for rightly directing our attention to the most salient points of expressing ourselves persuasively through language.  Accordingly, two discussion sessions per week (with a midway break) will be held on Mondays from 6:00-6:45pm ET and Thursdays from 12:00-12:45pm ET, beginning on 4 September 2023 and ending on 2 November 2023,

Required Texts

  • Edward P.J. Corbett’s Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (in first or second editions; PDF provided though purchase strongly recommended).
  • Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric, translated by Robert C. Barlett (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
  • Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria in the Loeb edition (Latin-English facing; PDFs provided).
  • Some additional readings will also be required (PDFs to be provided).  Readings are subject to change.

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John Poinsot – Cursus Theologicus

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Cursus Theologicus

The work of John Poinsot, also known as Joannes a Sancto Thoma (though as John Deely noted, his name has often been given in many other variations, across English, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, French, and Latin), has long been the victim of great neglect. His Cursus Philosophicus was critically-edited and published in the 1930s under the blessed endeavor of Beatus Reiser, O.S.B., and reprinted in 2008 by Olms Verlag. Currently, his Cursus Theologicus is undergoing a similar critical evaluation and re-publication.

Though the facsimile reprint volumes here are taken from the non-critical and therefore somewhat unreliable Latin text Vives edition of the 1880s, they are presented in full and affordably. The far superior critical Solesmes edition has thus far reached only the fifth volume (in 2015) and sits outside the price-range of many.

However, in the meantime and in an effort to promote the study and understanding of Poinsot, these ten volumes (the tenth being the index to the whole series) are presented as-is, in a reasonably durable, reasonably affordable set. All the volumes are entirely in Latin. Note that only the first four volumes were completed in Poinsot’s lifetime. The rest were compiled and edited by followers of his posthumously after his sudden death in 1644, drawing from notes he had left behind.

The total cost for all 15 printed volumes (10 tomes), before tax, is $261. They are also available here to download free in PDF. Please consider donating if you do! (If anyone tried downloading before, I had uploaded the wrong Zip file! Apologies! Corrected now.)

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Brief Table of Contents

  • Tomus Primus – Summary of the Sentences of Peter Lombard; introduction to and approbation of St. Thomas; Sacred Theology; God’s existence and nature.
  • Tomus Secundus – Attributes of God; the Work of the Six Days.
  • Tomus Tertius – I – The Ideas, Truth, Life, and Will of God.
  • Tomus Tertius – II – God’s Love, Justice, Mercy, Providence, etc.
  • Tomus Quartus – I – Mystery of the Sacred Trinity; Creation.
  • Tomus Quartus – II – Treatise on the Angels.
  • Tomus Quintus – I – Ultimate End of Humans; Human Acts.
  • Tomus Quintus – II – Human Acts; their Goodness and Evil.
  • Tomus Sextus – I – Good and Evil of Human Acts; Passions, Habits, Virtues.
  • Tomus Sextus – II – Effects of the Holy Spirit, Grace, Justification.
  • Tomus Septimus – I – Faith, Hope, Charity, Authority of the Pope; Homicide.
  • Tomus Septimus – II – Irregularity; Religion, Devotion, Prayer, Miscellaeny.
  • Tomus Octavus – The Incarnation.
  • Tomus Nonus – Sacraments in general; the Eucharist; Penance.
  • Tomus Decimus – Indices.

cursus theologicus – complete volumes

CURSUS THEOLOGICUS – TOMUS PRIMUS

In this first volume of his Cursus Theologicus, John Poinsot summarizes the four books of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, gives an introduction to the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, explains the connection and order of the whole Summa Theologiae, provides a treatise lauding and defending the authoritative teaching of St. Thomas, and exposits the first seven questions of the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae.

CURSUS THEOLOGICUS – TOMUS SECUNDUS

In the second volume of his Cursus Theologicus, Poinsot continues his commentary on the treatise concerning the divine nature, from question eight through fourteen, before turning to the work of the six days of creation, in questions sixty-five through seventy-four, all of the Prima Pars in the Summa Theologiae.

CURSUS THEOLOGICUS – TOMUS TERTIUS I

In the first of two parts in volume three of his Cursus Theologicus, Poinsot discusses the ideas of God, truth and falsity with respect to Him, and pursues the questions of God’s life and will.  Here he follows and exposits the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae Prima Pars.

CURSUS THEOLOGICUS – TOMUS TERTIUS II

In the concluding part of volume three in his Cursus Theologicus, Poinsot discusses many more topics concerning God: His love, justice and mercy, providence, potency, and beatitude. He also takes up here the questions of predestination—not only expositing St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae Prima Pars, but responding also to a pressing concern of his own age.

CURSUS THEOLOGICUS – TOMUS QUARTUS I

In this, the first part of the fourth volume in his Cursus Theologicus, Poinsot provides two treatises commenting upon the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae: first concerning the mystery of the sacred trinity, and second, concerning creation.

CURSUS THEOLOGICUS – TOMUS QUARTUS II

In this, the second part of the fourth volume in his Cursus Theologicus, Poinsot delivers a thorough treatise concerning the angels, commenting upon the corresponding part in the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae.

CURSUS THEOLOGICUS – TOMUS QUINTUS I

This, the first of two volumes in the fifth tome of Poinsot’s Cursus Theologicus, covers the first nine questions in the Prima Secundae of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, comprising the treatise on the ultimate end for human beings, and the beginning of the treatise on human acts.

CURSUS THEOLOGICUS – TOMUS QUINTUS II

The second of two volumes in the fifth tome of Poinsot’s Cursus Theologicus, this volume completes the treatise on human action and considers the goodness and evil of human acts, continuing to build our understanding of the Prima Secundae in Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae.

CURSUS THEOLOGICUS – TOMUS SEXTUS I

The first of two parts in volume six of his Cursus Theologicus, here Poinsot completes his discussion of the goodness and evil of human acts and takes up also the passions, habits, and virtues, expounding upon the insights of St. Thomas Aquinas in his Prima Secundae of the Summa Theologiae.

CURSUS THEOLOGICUS – TOMUS SEXTUS II

In this, the second of two parts in volume six of his Cursus Theologicus, Poinsot continues examining and expositing the Prima Secundae of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, taking up the topics of gifts, blessings, and fruits of the Holy Spirit, before turning to grace and justification.

CURSUS THEOLOGICUS – TOMUS SEPTIMUS I

Here, in the first of two parts in the seventh volume of his Cursus Theologicus, and acting as commentary upon the Secunda Secundae of Aquinas’ Summa Theologia, Poinsot treats of faith, hope, charity, the authority of the pope, and dedicates a question specifically to homicide.

CURSUS THEOLOGICUS – TOMUS SEPTIMUS II

In the second of two parts in volume seven of the Cursus Theologicus, John Poinsot discusses canonical impediments to holy orders (irregularity), the nature of religion, devotion, prayer, and various other questions pertaining to the conduct of spiritual life, following prompts from the Secunda Secundae of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae.

CURSUS THEOLOGICUS – TOMUS OCTAVUS

In this eighth volume of his Cursus Theologicus, Poinsot takes up commentary on the Tertia Pars of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, discussing the many nuances which follow upon the Incarnation.

CURSUS THEOLOGICUS – TOMUS NONUS

In this, the final substantive volume of the Cursus Theologicus, Poinsot completes his consideration of the Tertia Pars of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, with treatises concerning the sacraments in general, the sacrifice of the mass, the Eucharist, and of penance.

CURSUS THEOLOGICUS – TOMUS DECIMUS

This volume contains an invaluable set of indices to all ten tomes, including all citations of Sacred Scripture sorted by book, and a general, analytic index sorted alphabetically.

Sample Views

Video: https://twitter.com/LyceumInstitute/status/1672792840538054656/video/1

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