Content

The aim of this course is to familiarize students with the philosophical meaning of the teachings of Aquinas and those of other medieval thinkers.

In the academic year 2023-2024 the title of the course is: “Between Belief and Knowledge: Aquinas’s Commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate”

This course will focus on the issues of belief and knowledge as well as method in philosophical and theological thought of Thomas Aquinas through the careful study of his early Commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate and other related and relevant selections from other works of the corpus. We will focus on the nature of the sciences and the division and distinction of the theoretical sciences. We will explore the nature of metaphysics, its subject, principles and goals or things sought in it. This includes divine science as well as the distinction of Religious Theology from Philosophical Theology. The nature of human knowing and whether, and if somehow, how natural reason can attain knowledge of divine science and the nature of God will also be considered. Can philosophical reasoning be properly used in the context of belief in a science of faith concerned with God? These are many more topics will be considered in our study of Aquinas’s Commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate and other writings. What we will find is that Latin translations of philosophical writings from the Classical Rationalist period of Philosophy in the Lands of Islam played an important role in Aquinas’s critical formation of his own teachings on these topics.

This course meets Thursdays 9-11:40 am in Milwaukee and 16h00-19h in Leuven. After the first four weeks at Marquette University (MU) devoted to an overview of the Aristotelian traditions and the thought of Aquinas, the course will link on 28 September with the “Thomas in Context” graduate course at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL) with Prof. Andrea Robiglio for an enriching experience of the international character of the study of medieval philosophy. We will then start with three meetings with lectures and discussion on the Arabic tradition and Aquinas introducing the topical focus of the course. Through collaborative study with students at the famous Institute of Philosophy at KUL and elsewhere, we will draw on philosophical sources, including those of the Arabic philosophical tradition, important for understanding the development of the thought of Aquinas. The classes which follow will have student team presentations as well as one full day focused of preparing and writing sophisticated philosophical papers. The class ends for MU students at the end of the first week of December. For KUL students it continues for 2-3 more weeks. Teaching and discussions will be in English. Translations of key texts from the Arabic and Latin traditions will be made available by the instructors as necessary. Students with some facility in Latin and/or Arabic will be encouraged to make use of their skills.

Course material

The course material consists of:

• primary source texts,
• secondary literature (including video lectures) relative to the primary sources and/or the issue under discussion.

Format: more information

The course is taught in collaboration with Marquette University as a hybrid course.
That is, it will be taught using online tools and resources (such as video lectures to supplement secondary interpretive literature) and also in the classroom with face-to-face meetings once per week, combining short lectures with concise student presentations and classroom discussions and debates on the philosophical meaning of the teachings of Aquinas and those of other medieval thinkers.
The details of how the classes will be organized (including detailed schedule, concrete assignments, and seminar activities) will be explained in the Syllabus, which will be made available each year just before the beginning of the semester.

Generally speaking, students must

• read and think deeply about the philosophical texts assigned (i.e., required reading for each class meeting);
• prepare, either individually or working in groups, a brief report, which consists in a concise summary of the required readings and in a set of open questions (intending to identify the most important insights from the primary and secondary texts assigned); this report (in a file-document of no more than 120.000 bytes) must be sent to the instructors no later than 24 hours before class;
• analyze the assigned texts in greater depth and, keeping in mind the remarks and information provided by the instructors, be willing to challenge – on the basis of well-founded arguments and evidence – competing interpretations and commonly received views;
• meet individually with the instructors (beyond the regularly scheduled class meetings) in the course of the semester (e.g. from the 4th up to the 9th course week) in order to discuss viable choices and options for a topic for the final course paper;
• prepare a presentation of their final paper’s research question in order to receive feedback both from their fellow students and from the instructors.