Introduction to Philosophy

The two roots of philosophy: the rational nature of man, and the gift of primitive revelation and tradition.

The first emergence of systematic philosophy: the ancient Oriental peoples and the early Greek schools before Socrates.

The critical question as the essential question of philosophy; the Socratic method; Platonic idealism and its truth and error.

Aristotle's logic, natural sciences, metaphysics, and ethics; his achievement as the Philosopher of common sense and the foundation of scholasticism.

The retrogression of philosophy after Aristotle: the later Greek schools, Greco-Jewish philosophy, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Manicheism, and the Patristic synthesis.

The three factors that made possible the scholastic perfecting of philosophy: the recovery of Aristotle, the influence of Arabian and Jewish philosophers, and the work of the great scholastics.

Thomas Aquinas as the supreme philosopher; Duns Scotus and William of Ockham as the inaugurators of decline; Roger Bacon and Raymond Lull.

The dissolution of scholasticism and the birth of modern philosophy: Renaissance humanism, the Reformation, and the new science.

Modern and contemporary philosophy from Descartes to the twentieth century: rationalism, empiricism, Kant, idealism, positivism, pragmatism, and neo-scholasticism.

The three operations of the mind: simple apprehension, judgment, and reasoning; their products: concept, proposition, and argument.

The logical analysis of concepts and the terms that express them: comprehension, extension, universality, and the predicables.

The logical structure of judgment and proposition: quality, quantity, opposition, equivalence, and the distribution of terms.

The syllogism, induction, and the fallacies; the logical structure of demonstration and scientific proof.

The nature of truth as conformity of mind to reality; the nature of certitude, doubt, opinion, and the criterion of truth.

Survey and refutation of the major false epistemologies: dogmatism, scepticism, subjectivism, relativism, agnosticism, idealism, and ontologism.

The three sources of human certitude: evidence (immediate and mediate), authority, and faith; their respective scopes and limits.

The nature of science as demonstrated knowledge; the method of acquiring scientific certitude; the division of the sciences.

Being as the subject of metaphysics; the transcendentals; essence and existence; the analogy of being.

The transcendental properties of being: unity, truth, goodness, and beauty; their mutual convertibility and their grounding in act.

The major divisions of being: infinite and finite, substance and accident, act and potency, necessary and contingent.

Causality and the four causes; the emergence of created being from non-being through efficient causation; the causal argument.

The hylomorphic constitution of bodies; the marks of bodily being; the refutation of mechanism, dynamism, and monism.

The philosophical assessment of evolution; the creation of the world; the age and development of the universe.

Final causality in nature; the teleological argument; the refutation of mechanistic and chance explanations of cosmic order.

The nature of life; the vegetative soul in plants; the sensitive soul in animals; sensation, appetition, and local motion.

The rational soul: intellect and will; the unity of man; the spirituality and immortality of the human soul.

The five proofs for the existence of God from motion, efficient causality, contingency, degrees of perfection, and finality.

The divine attributes known by reason: simplicity, infinity, eternity, omniscience, omnipotence, and perfect goodness.

God's activity ad intra (intellect and will) and ad extra (creation, conservation, providence, and governance of the world).

The nature of ethics; the ultimate end of man; the norm of morality; law, conscience, and the determinants of the moral act.

Man's duties to God, self, and neighbour; the ethics of society, the family, the State, and the Church.