Great Books

2Welcome to Great Writers and Thinkers This course is relatively new. It is only the second time it has been offered. It grew out of a desire to provide first year students with the possibility of studying in the Aquinas/Great Books programme without the much larger commitment of the Aquinas Programme. But we have kept some of the most distinctive aspects of the Aquinas Programme. This course is team taught, which means that you will have two professors teaching you at the same time, sometimes both together, sometimes apart, often with both in the room. There is also an interdisciplinary quality to the course. We move from works of philosophy to poetry, to religious texts to novels and so on. One helpful way of thinking of this is that we are trying to bring the texts into dialogue, with each other and with our selves. We have chosen the texts and the schedule with an eye to different possible themes and questions but it is our experience that as the year goes on new and unanticipated themes and questions will emerge. A number of years ago a student who had majored in Great Books and Aquinas said, near the end of her degree, ‘but that’s all we are doing here, learning how to read’. This is exactly right. What we are trying to do is actually both quite simple and quite difficult. We are trying to learn to attend to texts and ideas that are not immediately our own. Our hope is not that you will simply agree or disagree with what you are reading. (You might find some of the things we are asking you to read distasteful and even repulsive.) Instead our hope is that you will seek to understand the text you are reading. What does it say and how does it say it? To try to understand something which is not your own with attention and clarity is a profound and hopeful act. That said, the course is fairly simple and straight forward. We will ask you to read things and then we will meet and talk about them. Then you will be asked to write papers and exams. We will also, from time to time, be asking you to complete smaller assignments. Your two professors are in touch with one another and we will both have a fairly clear idea of what the other one is teaching. We are both very happy and delighted to be back in the class room