Mission
Specific to the Catholic intellectual tradition is an abiding concern for the relation between faith and reason, the intelligibility of nature, the reality of organic form or soul, the inquiry into causal hierarchies, and the possibility of an ethics and political philosophy based on rational insight into human nature. Accordingly, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas form a basic framework in relation to which Neoplatonism, the Islamic contribution, the ferment of late Scholasticism, the emergence of early modern philosophy and natural science, the attempts at a synthesis of the natural and the human within German idealism, the impact of Nietzsche, and the analytical and phenomenological movements are studied.
Despite its richness and diversity, philosophy in the modern era has sometimes been marked by certain anti-philosophical tendencies. The skepticism widespread in our day concerning the very possibility of philosophy as search for truth about ultimate principles and the human good has roots, paradoxically, in philosophical modernity as such, as does the disregard, common in our day, for the place of prudence or practical wisdom in non-philosophical life. Cultivation of an intellectual awareness adequate to this situation is a principal goal of the School of Philosophy.