Comments on: The Liberal Arts: Dead or Rising? http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2012/09/13/the-liberal-arts-dead-or-rising/ A First Things Blog Sun, 26 May 2013 03:08:55 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Bret Lythgoe http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2012/09/13/the-liberal-arts-dead-or-rising/comment-page-1/#comment-74214 Bret Lythgoe Fri, 14 Sep 2012 12:27:04 +0000 http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/?p=47686#comment-74214 Often, when I go to the gym, I’m struck by how many tread mills I have to choose from. Clearly, exercise is not exactly the most popular of activities, because it’s hard. Similarly, studying the Liberal Arts is difficult. Certainly one is rewarded for the effort. But the rewards are sometimes subtle, and not in the financial realm. People like their money, and money is conspicuously invisible in the Liberal Arts. I would argue that all colleges, regardless of the major, require students to take, and successfully complete, the following courses: 1)philosophy, which would include not just an introduction to it, but basic logic, and the history of it: ancient philosophy, medieval, modern and contemporary. 2) A History of Art. 3) A History of Drama. 4) A history of religion. 5) A history of Literature.

The student would need to read all of Plato’s dialogues, some of Aristotle’s treatises, Some of Cicero’s speeches, Augustine’s Confessions, Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, Descartes Meditations, Discourse on Method, Thomas More’s Utopia, Shakespeare’s plays, and so forth. (much more could be included, this is just a rough draft).

]]>