<p class="p1"><span class="s1">JRR Tolkien’s great work, <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>, continues to be prescient and relevant to our present situation.<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span>Through the vehicle of a secondary world, Tolkien explores universal questions of the human person’s place in a world of contesting forces.<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span>Tolkien examines the control of external, hostile forces over the human person and to what extent the person has freedom to respond.<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span>Tolkien masterfully responds both to the modernist elevation and exultation of human autonomy and the postmodernist devaluation of the same by presenting a strongly Christian understanding of free will and the human person’s inherent dignity and worth.</span></p>

<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Joseph Pearce teaches this foundational course on the Classical Epic for the Albertus Magnus Institute. Join Professor Pearce for this eight-week course as he leads us on a journey into the epic worlds of Homer and Virgil, exploring the deepest dimension of three of the greatest works of western civilization, <i>The Iliad</i>, <i>The Odyssey</i> and <i>The Aeneid</i>.</span></p>

<p>The last philosophical science to be tackled in the traditional order of learning is the science of metaphysics.  This most difficult and most noble philosophical science studies not only the first principles of thought and all of created reality, but also the uncreated first Cause, namely, God Himself.  In this course we shall endeavor to follow in the footsteps of the two greatest metaphysical masters of all time, Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas.</p>

<p>In the Prologue of <i>Fides et ratio</i>, John Paul II articulates five “principal questions by which man’s life is demarcated: <i>Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? Why do evils exist here? What awaits us after this life?</i>” In this course, we will <span class="gmail_default">begin </span>to answer these questions<span class="gmail_default"> about ourselves</span> (especially the first three) from a philosophic point of view, taking our cues principally from major thinkers in the history of philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes,<span class="gmail_default"> and </span>Wojtyla/John Paul II. Our overall goal will be to develop an “adequate anthropology,” as Pope John Paul II calls for—that is, a truthful mode of thinking that does justice to all the complexities and dimensions of human existence—an especially important task nowadays in light of the various false and/or partial accounts of the human person that hold sway in <span class="gmail_default">our </span>contemporary <span class="gmail_default">intellectu<wbr />al landscape</span>.</p>