Great Books Certificate

During the first year, you will complete the History of Ideas sequence of eight courses. You will begin in the ancient world exploring Greek drama, history, and philosophy, then progressing into matters of religion, science, and mathematics. The thinkers of the Middle Ages build on and, in places, transform these foundations, while literature of the period engages intensely religious but also secular themes with originality and humor. In the Renaissance and Enlightenment, we trace the emergence of many of our modern ideas, including values and concepts that eventually figured into the founding of the United States of America. The year concludes with an examination of innovation in the 19th and 20th centuries, with new literary modes, new disciplines such as economics and psychology, and with revolutionary scientific discoveries such as evolution and relativity. By completing this sequence, you will earn the Great Books Certificate and will be ready for a broad range of future studies.

Associate of Liberal Arts

During the second year, you will complete the requirements for the Associate of Liberal Arts degree. Across eight courses, you will study the origins of concepts such as law, duty, freedom, and responsibility as they evolved from the earliest Greek thinkers and the Bible through Shakespeare and the philosophers of the Enlightenment. In the works of the second semester, many of these same issues are taken up and played out in the political and social developments of the 18th and 19th centuries. You will explore the different conceptions of rights that animated the American and French revolutions and the different attempts to organize these countries following those revolutions. We also consider, through the debates of more recent times, how liberty is interwoven into education and the study of the liberal arts.

The third and fourth year together complete your undergraduate degree. You will begin the year with an in-depth study of Greek Drama as a laboratory of human relations. Works by Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer provide similar opportunities for insight in the religious context of the middle ages. These literary explorations are complemented by courses that examine highly systematic investigations during the ancient, medieval, and Enlightenment eras, across a range of disciplines. We will look at Aristotle’s ethical and political theories, as well as the medieval religious thinkers who built on his work to address enduring theological questions and the nature of the good life. Machiavelli, More, and others, meanwhile, mark a transition to the modern political order. And we will also see how the mathematics of the ancient world led to the development of astronomy, which coupled with close observation was essential for the emergence of the scientific method.

Bachelor of Liberal Arts

In Year 4 you will earn your Bachelor of Liberal Arts degree. The year begins with a detailed examination of social contract theory and principles of social organization that shape our modern world. Social mores and pretenses are critiqued in the work of Molière, Swift, and Voltaire. Enlightenment philosophy explores the role of reason and experience amidst the received wisdom of political and religious institutions. This momentum carries over to a reimagining not only of the political and economic orders but of the biological world itself. At this same time the literature of the 19th and 20th centuries explores themes both timeless and ever more contemporary in their feel as authors grapple with the depth of human experience and the seeming limitations of rationality.

Master of Liberal Arts

The fifth year provides the most dedicated students with the opportunity to go beyond their Bachelor of Liberal Arts to complete a Master of Liberal Arts degree. Armed with the full conceptual framework of your past four years of study, you will revisit seminal texts from different historical eras, critically examining still challenging theories and problems. You will begin with Vergil and the Roman historians, and will continue into the writings of the Stoic philosophers, many of them grappling with questions raised by the power and problems of Rome. In the methodologies of ancient science and the intricacies of medieval philosophy, you will assess the creativity and power of remarkable attempts to understand our world. During the second semester you will dive into two of the classics of literature, Don Quixote and Paradise Lost. You will also confront Huygens, Newton, and Leibniz as calculus begins to provide newly detailed explanations of the world. You will see how Einstein found and fixed the flaws in Newton, while Lobachevskii and others showed that Euclid was not the last word on geometry. Finally you will explore the emergence of modern methods for understanding the mind in the foundational psychological works of James, Freud, and Jung.