Pontifex University is delighted to announce that Dr Carrie Gress’s unique introductory philosophy course is now open for registration as part of the Master’s in Sacred Arts program. It is called A Survey of Beauty, Truth and Goodness Through the Ages.
There is no comprehensive presentation of the changing view of the transcendentals like this that I know of. It focusses on what is at the heart of good (and bad) philosophy.
She writes:
Presented to those in the creative disciplines with little prior knowledge of philosophy, this course describes how the good, the true, and the beautiful have been perceived in Western thought from ancient Greece to the present day. The course will look carefully at how the ancients, such as Plato and Artistotle, perceived the good, the true, and the beautiful within the context of a unified and ordered cosmos knowable through the senses.
The medievals, such as St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure, saw this same sort of cosmological order in the created world around them, but within the context of Christian revelation. The good, the true, and the beautiful remained united, but were more deeply understood through Christian love and sacrifice.
Finally, the course will move to those later thinkers, starting with Ockham and Descartes up to the modern and post-modern period, who brought dramatic shifts to the older traditions. Overtime the good, the true, and the beautiful were separated into distinct entities as man’s senses were rejected with the mind as the arbiter of truth. Subjective thought — in the eye of the beholder –became the measure of what is consider good, true, and beautiful.
Dr Carrie Gress’s latest and acclaimed book, the Marian Option, God’s Solution to a Civilization in Crisis is available through Amazon.
The Journal for Catholic Culture & Arts 