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Marquette University, Fall 2021: Phil 6954 Seminar in Early or High Medieval Philosophy: Aristotle & Aquinas on the Human Soul. Synchronous online with TEAMS Thursdays 9-11:40 am US Central Time. This course begins on 2 September and on 30 September will link with the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Philosophy Institute, Aquinas in Context 16h-19h Central Europe Time (CET). The course is taught collaboratively by Profs. Richard Taylor and Andrea Robiglio.
Short Course Description
R.C. Taylor Phil 6954: “Aristotle and Aquinas on the Human Soul”
Location: This is an online synchronous course taught in Microsoft TEAMS.
Day and Time: MU Thursdays 09:00-11:40 US Central Time, KUL 16h-19h CET
Language of instruction: English.
This Marquette University (MU) course is taught in collaboration with the annual graduate course Aquinas in Context at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL) in Belgium taught by both Prof. Andrea Robiglio and Prof. Richard Taylor. Responsibility for grading at MU is with Prof. Taylor.
Philosophical Content:
The major focus of this course is the human soul in relation to body and to intellect in Aristotle and in Thomas Aquinas.
The first systematic account establishing the science of the soul or human life principle was set out in Greek by Aristotle (d. 322 BCE) in his De Anima. There he provides a detailed account of the relation of body and soul together with explanations of the nature of sensation, internal processes of perception and calculation, the nature of thought, and the issue of the separability of soul or part of it from body. And in his Nicomachean Ethics, he develops this into an ethical conception of human fulfillment in happiness (eudaimonia).
Aristotle and thinkers of the medieval Arabic, Hebrew and Latin traditions of philosophy provided insights that Thomas Aquinas drew upon in forming his unique conception of the soul as form of the body (with Aristotle and Ibn Rushd / Averroes) and as something that persists in existence after the death of the body (with Avicenna and Augustine & the European Christian Tradition). Using principles of natural philosophy and metaphysics, Aquinas sets out a distinctively novel metaphysics of human nature and rationality together with a new conception of ultimate human happiness in the afterlife.
MU Grading: Student team presentation 25%, student participation 25%, final course paper 50%. Weekly attendance is mandatory and constitutes part of the participation grade.
Course Structure:
Part 1 (MU only): 2 – 30 September
Lectures and intensive introductory study of Aquinas and the Arabic tradition, in preparation for our study of the long Aristotelian tradition of philosophical psychology.
Part 2 (MU & KUL) 30 September – 9 December
After an introduction to MU and KUL students of the course and its structure at class on 30 September, we will proceed with a new class format. Students will be provided with assigned readings and video lectures to be studied before class meetings since this will be largely a ‘flipped course’ with most class time devoted to discussion. For further information, see the Course Detailed Syllabus and the Detailed Weekly Assignments 2021.
Part 3 (KUL only) 16 & 23 December
(This course is significantly different in content from MU 6959 and KUL Aquinas in Context taught on the topic of First Principles in Fall 2020.)
In this course we will read closely most of the De Anima of Aristotle with the commentaries or accounts of Avicenna, Averroes, Aquinas & selected modern literature, finishing with a close reading of 4 key questions in Aquinas’s Disputed Questions on the Soul (QDDA) 1, 12, 14, 16. Earlier presentations by students will reference DQQA 3 & 4. Instructors will explicate the issues in DQQA 5 in class or via video recording. Thus, we will cover DQQA 1, 3, 4, 5, 12, 14, 16.
In the first three weeks of October, MU students will model how to use the accounts of Ibn Sina / Avicenna, Ibn Rushd / Averroes, Aquinas & selected modern literature in the study of Aristotle. In these weeks KUL students will watch videos from the earlier MU classes which briefly explain the importance of the Arabic Tradition for Aquinas on the topic of the course.
MU Grading & Attendance in brief: Team presentation (25%), Class participation (25%) Course paper (50%). Attendance at every class is mandatory.
Course Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, students will be able on their own to understand, interpret, and comment on Aquinas’s Aristotle’s philosophical writing, as well as orient themselves in the technical terminology and grasp the meaning and structure of the debated issues, some cases in the context of the Arabic philosophical tradition important to the development of the thought of Aquinas. This includes the development of these skills:
- identifying, summarizing, ‘reconstructing’ the arguments;
- engaging with sophisticated interpretations of problematic textual passages, making use of the primary and secondary sources and interpretive categories implied in them and looking for further conceptual paradigms to uncover the hidden assumptions of the reasoning;
- arguing analytically and historically for or against explanations of the debated issues as they have been presented in the literature;
- conceiving their own argumentative reflection and organizing it according to a concrete and intellectually insightful structure, expressing such an outline in a well-written and possibly elegant paper.