Written by members of the Department of Philosophy
Mount Saint Mary's College provides for students a sixty-one hour, four year, sequenced, and integrated core curriculum, one of whose goals is to raise questions about human goods and the choices we make in pursuit of them. In accordance with our Catholic identity and mission, our curriculum is grounded in the western tradition and, more particularly, its American and Catholic Christian manifestations. But the study of this tradition, in which most of our students have been raised, does not exhaust our curricular goal. On the basis of this study, we also ask that students reflect critically on the goods embodied in this tradition, on the extent to which these goods are true goods, on the ways in which the pursuit of these goods in the West falls short of the ideal, and on what we might learn about human goods by attending more carefully to the diverse heritages which combine to form our particularly American culture and to the goods identified and pursued in other cultures.

Our goal of educating students to identify, choose, and critically reflect upon human goods is addressed throughout the four years of the curriculum, especially its sequenced components. In the freshman year, all students take a six-credit Freshman Seminar and a twelve-credit sequence in Western Civilization (two semesters of history, one semester of literature and one semester of the fine arts, the literature and works of art studied date from the periods studied concurrently in the history sequence). The central theme of the Freshman Seminar is “choices,” and the course is organized around units dealing with education, work, and values. Through the use of short essays and narratives (fictional and biographical) the Seminar descriptively approaches the question of human goods and promotes in students a personal inquiry about the ends of human life: How should we live? How should we be educated? How should we work? How should we act as members of academic and social communities? What goods ought to be promoted in a life well-lived? At the same time, the Western Civilization sequence provides students with historical examples of moral agency and with examples of the pursuit of aesthetic goods.

In the sophomore year, all students take a year-long sequence in philosophy. This course continues the freshman-year program insofar as it draws its nourishment from a series of classical texts representing all the major periods in the history of philosophy. However, It also surpasses the freshman year becalm it is primarily concerned not with history but with the problematic of human nature, human knowledge, human happiness, the relation to the divine, moral agency , and human society. The course thereby shifts the students’ attention from descriptive narrations of human goods or first-order (e.g., literary) experiences thereof to a critical and reflective apprehension of them.

Students in the junior year particularize their study of the tradition which has shaped them. All juniors take a full-year sequence in the American Experience which, combining history and literature, echoes the freshman year’s study of Western Civilization. Juniors also take a full-year sequence in Theology; this course continues the discussion of the nature of the human and of human well-being and social responsibility and locates it in the communitarian tradition of the Catholic Perspective.

In the senior year all students must satisfy one-semester requirements in Ethics and in non-Western culture. The Ethics requirement can be satisfied either by the Department of Philosophy’s “Moral Philosophy” course or the Theology Department’s “Moral Theology” course, a requirement which emphasizes the College’s commitment to the centrality of philosophy in the reasoned reflection on human goods. A variety of interdisciplinary, non-western culture courses are offered. In these courses students attend to the hermeneutical issues involved in understanding other cultures, and they develop an understanding of non-western accounts of the human good as well as clarify the understanding of their own culture and its responses to questions about human goods.