Teaching and Learning > DISCOURSE
Teaching the Philosophy of Aquinas
Author: Linda L. Farmer
Journal Title: Discourse
ISSN: 1741-4164
ISSN-L:
Volume: 5
Number: 1
Start page: 151
End page: 158
Return to vol. 5 no. 1 index page
Teaching the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas—a thirteenth century Catholic monk whose writings are embedded in Aristotelian philosophy and ridden with strange concepts such as 'substantial form,' 'act,' 'potency,' 'agent intellect,' 'quiddity,' 'proper accident,' and 'phantasm'—is not an easy task. It's taken me many years and a lot of trial and error to find ways of effectively teaching Aquinas' philosophy. In what follows, I outline the challenges I have encountered and the methods of addressing them that have worked with my students, making Aquinas' philosophy more accessible, more intelligible and, sometimes even, rather enjoyable to learn.
The Challenges of Teaching Aquinas' Philosophy
I have encountered five main challenges in teaching Aquinas' philosophy:
- How to provide students with adequate knowledge of his philosophy within the time constraints of the academic term;
- How to adequately fill my students' lack of background knowledge of ancient and medieval history and philosophy without turning my course into a history rather than a philosophy course;
- How to motivate students to study a philosopher they perceive as archaic, boring and too theological;
- How to facilitate the reading of medieval texts and, more generally, difficult philosophical texts; and
- How to emphasise the philosophical relevance of such texts to current concerns.
As you can tell from this list, most of these challenges are encountered in a wide variety of philosophy courses, not just a course on Aquinas. So, unless you have ideally prepared and ideally motivated students, and only teach contemporary philosophers who have written extremely accessible texts and whose philosophy can be easily covered in the few weeks of an academic term, the strategies I propose should, for the most part, be adaptable to your students and the courses you teach.
Challenge #1: How to provide students with adequate knowledge of Aquinas' philosophy within the time constraints of an academic term
Wright State University is on a quarter system, so I have ten weeks to teach a philosophy which, even with ideal students, would take much longer. When I first taught a course on Aquinas, I opted for a textbook. I figured this was a good way of imparting a general understanding of his philosophy while avoiding all the difficulties of actually reading primary Thomistic texts. It was a mistake. It encouraged memorisation of arguments and historical facts rather than engagement in and understanding of Aquinas' views. It also resulted in students turning in exegetical papers closely resembling their lecture notes for the course rather than the required argumentative essays.
After experimenting with different primary texts and different sets of selections from primary texts, I settled on selections from the Summa Theologica that deal with the distinction between faith and reason and the proofs for the existence of God; and selections from Questions on the Soul for Aquinas' philosophical anthropology. These selections cover fundamental aspects of Aquinas' philosophy and deal with topics of interest to students or, at least, topics which can be made interesting to them. (Just recently Peter Kreeft has published an anthology of selections from the Summa Theologica entitled A Shorter Summa which I plan to try in the autumn. There are several nice things about this anthology: the selections provide a good overview of Aquinas's system, there's a glossary of key terms, and it's a manageably small volume.)
Challenge #2: How to adequately fill students' lack of background knowledge of ancient and medieval history & philosophy without turning the course into a history rather than a philosophy course
In order to facilitate my students' understanding of Aquinas' philosophy, I have found two preliminary steps necessary. First, as my students are generally unfamiliar with the philosophy of Aristotle and some familiarity greatly increases the accessibility of Aquinas' conceptual framework, I have found it invaluably useful to go over Aristotle's four causes, his hylomorphic theory and at least the first two books of his De anima. (A useful and very affordable anthology for this is The Pocket Aristotle.) What to cover in Aristotle will, of course, depend on what you want to contextualise in Aquinas.
Second, as even fewer of my students are familiar with the historical context of Aquinas' thought and works, I have needed to devote at least some time to filling this lacuna. However, as I already have so little time to devote to Aquinas' philosophy—having only ten weeks in a term, two of which are spent on Aristotle—and not wanting my course to turn into a history course rather than a philosophy course, I have tried to limit this endeavour to its absolute minimum: the resurgence of Aristotelian texts in the Christian West; a short biography of Aquinas' life and works; scholasticism and the structure of scholastic texts; and, where appropriate given the issue raised by Aquinas in a particular text, summaries of the views of other thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Averröes and Avicenna.
While a pragmatic decision on my part, this strategy has consistently had a great pedagogical benefit: it stimulates student curiosity and further reading. Each time I teach this course, at least a handful of students approach me to ask about what books and/or courses I would recommend to find out more about medieval history, Plato, church history or Augustine.
Given that situation, I put together a recommended reading list for the course. Perhaps this is just my particular students, but this did not work at all and I'm quite convinced they were either thrown in the trash immediately or hardly glanced at. I think the personalised response and the enthusiasm you share about a particular book or course goes a long way towards bolstering your students' expanding interests. And if you can recommend a novel (such as Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum or the Brother Cadfael mysteries), a website or a film (such as The Name of the Rose), the likelihood of the student following your recommendation seems to increase significantly and it also seems to increase the likelihood that they will follow your next, more serious recommendation.
Challenge #3: How to motivate students to study a philosopher they perceive as archaic, boring and/or too theological
Occasionally I get one or two students with a keen interest in Aquinas, but the following, paraphrased student lament is, unfortunately, much more the norm: Aquinas died hundreds of years ago, he was a Catholic monk and he wrote in this incredibly dry, mechanical style— so why bother studying him? Can't we just memorise some stuff and do multiple-choice exams? And it is the norm because most of the students who take the course are there because they need an elective and this one fit their schedule well or because Aquinas was, like them, a Catholic so they should be able to get an 'A' without too much effort.
Beginning the course with the study of some Aristotelian texts has some advantages in terms of motivation. Students tend to perceive the study of Aristotle as more legitimate, even if he's also a long-dead philosopher who made some well-known mistakes and also wrote in a dry, mechanical style. However, what really works is shattering the illusions students have of Aquinas (and Aristotle, too) and emphasising the contemporary relevance of what they have to say.
Aristotle was not a crusty bookworm who merely summarised and systematised the theories and ideas of his predecessors. He developed new theories, passionately argued against differing views, and devoted himself to teaching and research in almost every branch of knowledge—he was a Renaissance man before the Renaissance. And, as for Aquinas, he was not a close-minded, religious fanatic simply reiterating Church dogma. Aquinas was, in many ways a radical. He rejected substance dualism, the most commonly espoused view in the Christian West, arguably, to this day. Unlike many then and many today, he firmly believed that faith and reason are compatible and complimentary. And if the Condemnations of 1272 and 1277 were intended against some of his teachings, then he must have been perceived as a dangerous person even during his lifetime.
Those are just some of the sorts of things that can be said about Aristotle and Aquinas that address some erroneous, preconceived notions of these thinkers. Once students have a sense that the philosophers covered in the course are interesting people who might actually have something interesting to say about an issue, topic or question of contemporary relevance, then their motivation to learn dramatically rises.
Challenge #4: How to facilitate the reading of medieval texts and, more generally, difficult philosophical texts
Explaining how and why Aquinas' texts are set up the way they are, is, of course, a necessary first step. The real difficulty is not, however, that there are objections to his position—on the contrary, the text contains responses and replies—but, rather, the highly technical vocabulary employed throughout. Students read the text but don't understand a single sentence. If you, for example, teach Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, you know what I'm talking about. It's not just that a few terms are unfamiliar, but that most of them are.
Here again, spending some time on Aristotelian texts is useful. It introduces some of the central concepts in Thomistic philosophy: 'form,' 'matter,' 'potency,' 'actuality.' If you don't cover Aristotle first, then explaining those concepts prior to assigning any of the readings is essential.
Providing your students with a glossary of those concepts as well as other difficult or technical concepts is very effective, but only so long as you spend time explaining the concepts listed prior to when they start reading, and not just give them a handout with the expectation that they will read it, understand it and utilise it to understand the assigned reading. (So although I appreciate the fact that Kreeft has included a glossary in his A Shorter Summa, it will only save me paper, not time.)
A great assistance in reading difficult philosophical texts, in my experience, is being shown how to do so by example. I have a student read the first paragraph of the first assigned reading and then, step-by-step, walk them through the process of understanding that paragraph. What is the question asked or issue being addressed? What concepts are employed and what do they mean? What distinctions, if any, are made? etc. And this process is repeated for several more paragraphs, so that they 'get the hang' of it.
It's important to emphasise that difficult philosophical texts cannot be speed-read and frequently, if not always, require more than one reading. And, if this is true, it's not realistic nor pedagogically sound to assign lengthy selections of difficult texts, particularly at the beginning of the course, when students are still familiarising themselves with the conceptual framework of the philosopher in question.
I've also found study guides very useful. By 'study guide', I mean a list of questions that the student should be able to answer after reading and understanding the particular assigned reading. Depending on the level of student motivation, it may be necessary to require that those study guides be turned in to ensure that they are, in fact, used by the students.
Study guides have the added benefit of ensuring that if the material covered wasn't understood on the first reading, the student will in fact reread the selection until he/she can answer the questions in the study guide. If the study guides are graded, students are all the more motivated to answer the questions correctly and, consequently, all the more likely to read the selection more than once.
Challenge #5: How to emphasise the relevance of Aquinas' philosophy today
I have left the most difficult challenge for last: how to emphasise the relevance of Aquinas' philosophy today. My students at Wright State are quite pragmatically minded and lose interest rather quickly in what they are studying if they don't see how it is relevant to their lives in some way. Perhaps you have students similar to my own.
And you have, perhaps, been similarly educated as I have been. I can't remember ever wondering how what someone taught, argued or theorised had to do with my personal concerns. Ideas, however complex, strange, difficult to understand, or seemingly incompatible with what is held to be the case today, were interesting in terms of who and when they were expounded, in fact, were interesting in their own right.
While I still try to impart this same love of ideas in and for themselves to my students, I also realize that times have changed and so have the ways in which to foster that same curiosity, enthusiasm and passion in others. I also may have read too much contemporary philosophy on the nature of texts. I'm not sure. But I'm now convinced, and my students demand, that texts speak to them.
Surely, my choice of which texts or which selections from texts to cover in a course is guided by this concern. Aquinas' views on the relation between faith and reason are immediately relevant today, at least to American students accustomed to believing that it is perfectly fine to believe, through faith, certain tenets—for example that the universe is very young, that there was a worldwide flood within the last two millennia—even though these are utterly at odds with what science sets forth.
Aquinas' arguments for the existence of God are also quite relevant, as they are not based on intuition or 'just knowing,' and indicate that belief in the existence of a Supreme Being is not an irrational, baseless belief—nor should it be.
As most of my students have been taught that to be a Christian one necessarily had to be a substance dualist, teaching them what Aquinas—a saint of the Catholic Church, after all—actually held is particularly thought provoking and controversy stirring for my students. This is further enhanced by the implications Aquinas himself draws from his rejection of substance dualism: what it means for immortality, what it means for the final Resurrection, what it truly means to be a human person.
Beyond the selection of texts to cover and drawing connections between the issues raised in those with contemporary questions, concerns or topics, one other strategy I used to emphasise the relevance of Aquinas for today is to include, in the 'study guides' I mentioned earlier, questions such as 'Given what you read, what do you think Aquinas would say about x?' x being a contemporary issue. For example, what would Aquinas say about teaching evolution as well as creation in high school biology classes (which, by the way, is the case in Ohio)? Or, what kind of philosophy of mind best describes Aquinas' view? Physicalism? Property dualism? Substance dualism? Functionalism?
Conclusion
So, those are the five main challenges I have encountered in teaching the philosophy of Aquinas, and how I have tried to meet them to the best of my abilities. Hopefully, some of what I have learned through trial and error will be useful to you in your teaching, either of the philosophy of the Dumb Ox, or to any of those philosophers you cover that draw a sigh from students as being passé, boring, too difficult or just not worth studying.
Return to vol. 5 no. 1 index page
This page was originally on the website of The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. It was transfered here following the closure of the Subject Centre at the end of 2011.
