In the absence of an authentic advising schedule, the Dead Philosophers Society has put together a recommended sequence for students within the Holy Apostles philosophy program. While it is tempting to jump right into metaphysics, be advised that logic and ancient and medieval philosophy are practically pre-requisites to a successful understanding of what we mean when we say subsistent being. By following the sequence of categories recommended by Aristotle and St. Thomas below, you’ll have a good introduction to philosophy and a more meaningful time studying it than if you bounce throughout the course offerings with no rhyme or, perish the thought, reason.
The way the categories work below is simple – take a selection of courses from section 1 before doing so from section 2, and so on, as courses in the first sections are prior in knowledge than those in the subsequent ones. If you need an explicit path, here’s a route – philosophy for theologians, logic, ancient and medieval, natural law, philosophy of nature, philosophy of human nature, modern, intro to moral, medical, or sexual, political, and metaphysics. Feel free, of course, to expand beyond this list with the other courses in each of the sections. One caveat: don’t let logic scare you. If you can get through that class, the rest will be easier all the way up to metaphysics.
- Logic (Categories, De Interpretatione, Prior Analytics), including Epistemology (Posterior Analytics)
- DL 028 – Philosophy for Theologians
- DL 032 – Logic (this first or second in this section, preceded only by Philosophy for Theologians)
- DL 024 – Ancient and Medieval Philosophy
- DL 010 – Natural Law: What it is and Why We Need It (Read as epistemology)
- DL 001 – Introduction to Thomas Aquinas
- DL 007 – The Liberal Arts: Their History and Philosophy
- Natural Philosophy (Physics), including Philosophical Psychology (De Anima)
- DL 020 – Philosophy of Nature (this first in this section)
- DL 015 – Philosophy of Human Nature (Read as epistemology; take before or concurrent with DL 004)
- DL 021 – Introduction to Modern Philosophy (You’ll have a better time of this course if it’s taken after DL015)
- DL 023 – Science and Belief
- DL 029 – Galileo: Science and Religion
- Ethics (Nicomachean Ethics), including Politics (Politics)
- DL 004 – Introduction to Moral Philosophy (this first in this section)
- DL 002 – Introduction to Sexual Ethics
- DL 041 – Medical Ethics
- DL 027 – Political Philosophy
- Metaphysics including Natural Theology
- DL 019 – Metaphysics
- DL 035 – Newman and Kierkegaard
- DL 039 – The Science Before Science
- DL 040 – Analytic Philosophy
