Newman famously suggested that the disciplines, or parts of human knowledge, within a university should be complete and coherently ordered.  Before turning to Newman in a future conversation, we speak first with Brian Carl about St. Thomas’s understanding of what it means for something to be a ‘body of knowledge’ and how these bodies might be organized within a university.  Should bodies of knowledge be distinguished by what they study, by their end, or by their methods (or some combination of these)?   How does the traditional ordering of the liberal arts fit within or alongside the Aristotelian ‘division of the scientiae? And what did we lose at the birth of modernity when the priority theoretical knowledge over practical knowledge was reversed?

Links of potential interest:

Thomas Aquinas, The Division and Methods of the Sciences

The Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas

Brian Carl’s ‘Academia’ page

Ernest Fortin, The Birth of Philosophic Christianity: Studies in Early Christian and Medieval Thought