This seminar, for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, examines two topics central to the work of the Witherspoon Institute, namely, (1) the purpose of the university and (2) friendship and marriage. Unfortunately, these topics are often taken up from the vantage point of the culture wars, rather than from a patient, careful study of first principles. In these two weeks, we examine them from the background of philosophical anthropology, the metaphysics of the person, and a study of personal action and the human good.

This seminar, for graduate students in philosophy and related fields, explores Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of practical rationality alongside work by contemporary analytic philosophers.