The following is a list of works read in whole or in part in the curriculum of Thomas Aquinas College. They are not all of equal weight. Some are regarded as masterworks, while others serve as source of opinions that either lead students to the truth or make the truth more evident by opposition to it. In 2010 College then-Dean Brian T. Kelly began a series of presentations to the Board of Governors about why the curriculum includes particular authors and subjects.
Freshman Year | Sophomore Year | Junior Year | Senior Year
Compositions
Writing requires both greater completeness and greater precision than does speech. On the one hand, the writer cannot make assumptions about the unknown reader; on the other hand, his prose must be efficient. The College helps students develop their writing skills through the essays they write periodically each year. Five essays are written in freshman year, four sophomore year, and two lengthier essays are written in junior year. These essays are reviewed carefully by tutors for content as well as for grammar, style, and arrangement and development of ideas. Seniors write a more substantial “Senior Thesis.”
Senior Thesis
The Senior Thesis is an integral part of the curriculum. As compared with the other parts, it requires a greater independence on the part of the student. He frames a question of the sort the authors in the program themselves frame and, under the direction of a tutor, refines, explores, and answers that question. The student’s answer need not be ultimate, but it must not be superficial or simply the repetition of authority. The thesis is of greater length than the other compositions in the program and is defended before a committee of faculty examiners in a session open to all.
The ability to carry out such an investigation and reasonably to account for and defend its conclusions is an important aim of the program, and a successful Senior Thesis may be seen as a formal and public display that the student has begun to have such an ability in his own right.
The following titles are representative of Senior Theses:
- The True Method of Procedure in Biological Science
- Obedience and Its Relationship to Charity
- The View of Human Nature Underlying the United States Constitution
- The Role of Suffering in Redemption
- A Defense of the Legitimacy of the Calculus
- The Effect of Philosophy on Language: A Consideration of the Poetry of T. S. Eliot
- Why Should Music Be Studied Mathematically?
- A Consideration of the Difficulties of the Special Theory of Relativity
- The Difference between Grammar and Logic
- The Atomic Theory in View of the Physics of Aristotle
- Whether Men Can Be Good without Grace
- A Consideration of the Ways in Which Galileo and Newton Use the Infinite in Understanding Motion
- An Analysis and Critique of John Locke’s Theory of the End of Government
- Is Tonal Music Natural?
- When Is the Rational Soul Present in Man’s Generation?
- The Natural Law in the Declaration of Independence: A Classical Interpretation