The Philosophy of the Human Person
Professor: | Jules van Schaijik, Ph.D. |
When: | 8 sessions, 8-10 p.m. every second Tuesday evening, beginning January 8, 2008 |
Where: | 519 N. High St., West Chester, PA |
Cost: | $250.00 |
Course description:
At the center of today’s deepest and most divisive controversies lies the question about the nature and dignity of the human person: What does it mean to be a human person? How must we treat others and ourselves to respect our personhood? What must we do in order to thrive as persons? This course is designed to address these fundamental questions. It will be in deliberate and essential continuity with the perennial philosophy (i.e. thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas) but our readings will be drawn mainly from more recent thinkers such as John Henry Newman, Josef Pieper, Karol Wojtyla, Dietrich von Hildebrand and John F. Crosby. One important reason for this is that these thinkers are profoundly attuned to the particular concerns and questions of contemporary man.
Per session topics:
- The Unique Selfhood and Inner Life of the Human Person
- The Person’s Capacity for Truth
- The Challenge to be Good
- Recovering the Heart
- Body and Soul
- Immortality
- Person and Community
- The Human Person in Relation to God
Tentative list of reading material*:
- Selections from John F. Crosby, The Selfhood of the Human Person
- C.S Lewis, Abolition of Man
- Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture
- Victor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
- Plato’s dialogue on the question of immortality, Phaedo
- Selection from Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility
- Two or three sermons of John Henry Newman
- Selection from Romano Guardini, World and Person
- Selection from Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Heart
* A definite list will be published well before the beginning of the course. Students can expect to be assigned no more than about two hours of reading between sessions (i.e. one hour per week).
Jules van Schaijik was born and raised in The Netherlands. Originally planning a career in business, his interest in philosophy was awakened at Franciscan University through the discovery of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s thought in the areas of love, marriage and ethics. His MA and PhD are from the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein. He has taught in the Netherlands, Austria and the U.S. He and his wife, Katie, are co-founders of the Personalist Project.