The Sapientis Institute

On Monday, March 28^th a new class in Material Logic begins, to be followed soon after by Physics. 

With many English works in addition to the Latin.  The ISS plans to add 5 new, out-of-print works of Scholastic philosophy (and, yes, even some theology) every week.   The goal is to create the single largest library—online and off—of Scholastic sciences and arts. 

Students of the Sapientis Institute will find this library to be an invaluable resource during their studies.  Visit the ISS for more information.  

The Sapientis Board has agreed to waive all course fees for clergy, religious and seminarians with effect from the Michaelmas Term 2010.

The Sapientis Institute believes that goal of reviving authentic Thomistic Philosophy within the Church will best be served by encouraging as many clergy, religious and seminarians to study with us. 

We began to pursue this goal by making our courses available on-line in order to remove a geograhical barrier. We now wish to remove any potential financial barrier as we are acutely aware that in many countries fees of the Sapientis Institute may be beyond the means of a number of clergy. 

With regard to Latin we have made a number of seat available in our Latin 1A and Latin 1B courses. The reasons for this are as follows:

• to remove a barrier that some priests may encounter when wishing to study the philsophical, theological and liturguical patrimony of the Church. 
• the Board is aware that many diocese are requiring priests who wish to celebrate the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite to prove their comptence in the Latin language.  We are hoping to make this easier for priests by offering a free on-line course in Ecclesiastical Latin.

For more information go to our Clergy Registration page.

Latin is not a language that is easy to learn without someone to teach you. Below are some of the advantages of the Sapientis Latin program:

• Live on-line lectures. You can ask questions and interact with your lecturer. A genuine class-room experience.
• A course in Ecclesiastical Latin i.e the Latin used by the Church. 
• All lectures are recorded. You can review your lectures at your convenience
• Regular quizzes and exercises can be submitted to help you assess your progress.
• Opportunity to meet with lecturer on-line for individual consultations (this is by pre-arrangement and during set office hours). 
• Home schoolers will be assisted (where possible) to provide evidence to meet requirements to gain credits for these courses.
• Course Fees cover the whole household provided they are using a single on-line connection. Several siblings can study together.
• Extremely competitive course fees. In fact we would like to here if you can finds a more affordable option.

We hope you will be joining us.

Register here.

More about our Latin program.

More about our Beginning Latin course.

Atheists like to pretend they are very logical people. Nothing could be further from the truth. Using the logical tools developed by St. Thomas Aquinas and the authentic Thomistic commentators you will learn to prove that modern secularism is a house built on logical sand.

We will not only be applying our logical skills to academic subjects. By using practical examples from the media you will learn how to spot the logical flaws in many politicians and commentators arguments.

You will not only be acquiring new knowledge you will also be refining your logical skills and learning the habits of easy and consistent logical thinking.

This course forms the basis for further studies in Thomistic Philsophy. It will help you to construct reasonable arguments that can help you discover the truth and prove your point in any work, social or academic setting.

Register here

More on the Sapientis philosophy program

More on Formal Logic

The ISS membership form that used to be at the bottom of the page has moved to the Registration Form page of the website. 

Are you in the Europe, Middle-East and Africa time zone? Would you like to take a Sapientis course but are frustrated that the lecture times do not suit you?

Would you be interested in joining an EMEA study group?

My experience is that the course material is very clear and understandable, but the lack of a regular lecture time means that you don't keep up with the course material. Perhaps a study group will help us keep up with the programme? As we are talking EMEA here I will use Standard English spelling - no programs.

These study groups wouldn't be lectures or officially part of the Sapientis programme. Although we may from time to time be able to get a lecturer to drop in.  

I am eager to start study groups for:

Formal Logic,

Philosophical Physics,  and

Beginning Latin 1 (Latin 1A)

Anyone else interested? Drop me a line at cordeiro AT societyofscholastics DOT org.

Christopher Cordeiro

The new term will begin the week starting 26th September.

Full details of courses dates and times will be posted within the next few days.

To all our American students, staff and readers - A happy 4th of July.

A few of our students have asked for a bit more information about our lecturers.

To-day we are focussing on our Latin lecturer, Mr David West.

Born on October 12, 1981, David West is currently pursuing graduate work in Latin and Greek towards a Master’s degree in Humanities at the University of Dallas, with the intention of afterwards pursuing doctoral work in the classical and Christian authors of antiquity.

Raised an Episcopalian, he converted to the Catholic Faith after his second year of college. The valedictorian of his class, Mr. West graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Dallas in 2004 with a B.A. in Politics and a Concentration in Classics (Latin and Greek), having studied extensively under his own mother and father, both of whom are professors at the same institution.

He then passed almost five years in formation towards the Catholic priesthood. Having nearly completed his studies in philosophy, Mr. West left the seminary on the advice and with the blessing of his superiors after Easter in 2009.

Previously, upon entering the seminary, he had performed so well on the Latin placement exam that he was exempted from taking any of the required Latin courses. In addition to the daily contact with the Latin language afforded him through the richness of the seminary’s liturgical life, he continued to read Latin frequently over the course of his studies, taking advantage of the seminary’s collection of the Patrologia Latina and of the Latin works of St. Thomas Aquinas.

In short, Mr. West has been studying and reading Latin for the past ten years. He has also done much private tutoring in Latin and, most recently, taught high school Latin during the fall 2009 semester. This summer he is teaching Sapientis Beginning Latin online, and is also taking a Latin course of his own on Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics at Harvard University.

This article from the New York Times recently caught my eye.  It reports on a recent US Department of Education study that found that "on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction."  

In tested performance online students on average ranked in the 59th percentile compared with the 50th percentile for those who received face-to-face instruction.

Online education offers a number of advantages:

Lecturers have to be better prepared and lectures have to be carefully planned.  As our Sapientis lecturers can attest.

I find that the ability to listen to lectures again really helps.

Having lectures in your home means that you miss fewer lectures.

Any other ideas?

The Sapientis Institute is making 10 places available to clergy, religious and seminarians that would like to learn Latin. This is a Beginner’s Latin class which starts this week. The course is free to the first ten clergy, religious, or seminarians that apply.

Course details can be found at Beginning Latin.

Applicants merely need to send an e-mail expressing their interest to us.

Kindly extend this offer to clergy, religious and seminarians that you know.

Jumping into Metaphysics for a short while, we’ve clarified the object of Logic by discussing the difference between real being (i.e., ens reale or mind-independent being) and being of the reason (i.e., ens rationis or mind-dependent being).  We saw that beings of the reason, which are understood precisely because of their inability to exist, are of two kinds depending on their opposition to real existence: negation and relation.  We saw that some relations of reason have foundations in something insofar as that thing exists in reality, while some relations of reason have foundations in something insofar as that thing exists in intellectual knowledge: these latter we call second intentions, and it is these that we are concerned with in Logic.  We said that these second intentions vary according to the different ways that a subject can be known.  When it is known by simple apprehension we have such second intentions as definition, term, extension, etc.  When it is known by judgment we have such intentions as being the subject of predication, supposition, contradiction, perseity, etc.  When it is known by reasoning we have such second intentions as induction and deduction, syllogistic moods and figures, demonstration, dialectics, etc.    

With the goal of explaining the various kinds of certitude that a valid syllogism can present, we are ultimately aiming at demonstration; this means that we must begin by looking at those various second intension or logical relations which are necessary in order to construct a demonstrative syllogism.  Since definition is always the middle term in demonstration, we must first examine definition; since definition isn’t possible without understanding genus, species, difference, property, and accident we must begin with the relations of the predicables; and since the predicables are the five possible logical relations (second intentions) of the logical universal, we will first begin by examining the logical universal and the ways it can be related to its logical inferiors.  Once we’ve examined the perfect process of reason, demonstration, we will examine the various ways that it can fall short of this: scil., dialectics and the lesser degrees of certitude. 

After an introduction which covered the nature and branches of philosophy—discussing how philosophy became wrongly divorced from science in modern thought—we talked about the nature of Logic, its division into natural and artificial, the doctrine of Logic and the art of Logic, and the division of the one science of Logic into Formal and Material studies.  We said that things in reality have certain properties which characterize them, but as they exist in the intellect they take on new properties which can be utilized to bring out new knowledge.  We saw that a perfect process of reasoning validly concludes to new knowledge but also that such a conclusion can be of varying grades of certitude. We talked about how Formal Logic is interested in those logical properties which are necessary to correctly bring out conclusions from our old knowledge, while Material Logic is interested in those logical properties (e.g., genus, species, property, definition, division, demonstration, probability, etc.) which are responsible for different degrees of certitude in our valid reasoning.  We saw that while Logic and its arguments appeal only to the intellect by means of intellectual evidence—some arguments leading to absolutely certain knowledge in demonstration, some leading to various degrees of probability in dialectics—there are also attempts in human discourse to force one to accept a conclusion by appealing, not only to the intellect, but to the will and the emotions: this is the domain of Rhetoric and Politics which depend upon the study of Psychology because they are concerned with the interaction between intellect, will, and sensitive appetites. 

We’ve made a distinction between the operations of the intellect, the products of those operations, and the signs of those products.  Beginning with simple apprehension, we’ve examined the nature of this operation and its product, the concept.  We saw the first two logical properties that every nature acquired when it is conceived by the mind: comprehensive content and extension.  Following our general procedure of definition then division, now that we’ve covered the concept in general, we will divide the concept into its various kinds according to its various logical relationships.  

A student shares his experiences of trying to learn Thomistic philosophy.

"For many years I have been wrestling with St. Thomas and I have to admit that for most of that time I haven’t been winning. I just can’t get my arms around the big boy, he wasn’t called the Dumb OX for nothing.

Now I confess that I am not the sharpest pencil in the case and that most probably has something to do with it. I read a question in the Summa and I find myself heartily agreeing with all the objections. Then I am heartily agreeing with Thomas when he refutes them. In the end I just feel dumb, because the objections still seem pretty valid and St Thomas’ answer seems equally valid.

I have spent much of this time circling my opponent, I admire him. I read his biographies and am awed by him. I appreciate his holiness. I circle round looking for a new hold, looking for a new trick but, try as I might, I just can’t get inside his world view.

In this I am like a lot of Catholics. We praise St. Thomas, we offer him as a model, we know that the Popes tell us to go to Thomas and so we do. We even seek out those wise few who claim to have been eye to eye with the master but somehow they can’t teach us how they did it.

I have been told to read a hundred different books. You should read Being and Essence, you can’t read Being and Essence because it supposes that you are familiar with the terms, read Maritain’s Seven Lectures on Being, Read his ‘Degrees of Knowledge’, Read Pieper on St Thomas, Read Chesterton’s biography.

And told to follow a hundred different methods, read it alone, you need a tutor , get the overall picture, read each passage carefully a few lines a day and meditate upon it. Read it in a group with a glass of red wine. I can buy that last part.

But until recently all of this left me floored. Then I came across the International Society of Scholastics and the Sapientis Institute’s online program. And two very important things became clear to me. The first, but not the most important, thing was that the Summa is not for beginners. St Thomas says so himself and it is also concerned with Theology so unless you have already completed a course in Thomistic philosophy, put it down.

Secondly, but more importantly, something has gone fundamentally wrong with our approach to philosophy. Almost all the university courses begin with metaphysics - which is the last thing you should study. A true Thomistic programme begins with Logic and teaches you how to think before you have to do the heavy lifting part of thinking. You then move on, careful step by careful step, as you approach metaphysics.

With that approach philosophy is not the preserve of the privileged few but something that anyone who takes the time and has a good educational foundation can master.

And I think that is the way the big boy would have liked it!"