The concept for Wisdom Academies grew out of an idea related
to teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas, which he inherited from Socrates, Plato,
and Aristotle: that the intellectual virtue of docilitas (docility/teachability)
is a necessary condition for being educated. St. Thomas maintained that the
moral virtue of prudence, which, he held, is a species of common sense,
causes docilitas.
Before being taught outside the home, children generally learn some docility
from parents and from their individual conscience, which, according to Aquinas,
is the habit of prudence acting as judge, jury, witness, and prosecution of
personal choices. In learning docility, we all acquire some common sense.
Common sense is simply some understanding of first principles that are causing
some organizational whole to have the unity it has that causes it to tend to
behave the way it does. It is an understanding common to anyone who
intellectually grasps the nature of something, the way the parts (causal
principles) of a whole incline to organize to generate organizational
existence, unity, and action. Strictly speaking, common sense is the habit of
rightly applying first principles of understanding as measures of truth in
immediate and mediated judgment, choice, and reasoning! Considered as such, it
is the first measure of right reasoning!
Contemporary Enlightenment colleges and universities are essentially designed
to drive out common sense from the psyche of students, convince them that the
only species of understanding (common sense) is mathematical physics. In doing
this, it causes students to become anarchists, unteachable, people out of touch
with reality who cannot tolerate to listen or to speak to, or with, anyone who
disagrees with them.
The only method that can possibly work to correct this problem is the one these
Academies essentially use. This is not because these Academies are proposing
them, but because they are evidently true to anyone with common sense
about human education: such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas.
The truth of this claim became evident to me as a Eureka!
Moment as I was reading Adler's monograph How to Speak and How to Listen.
As I dove intellectually more deeply into it to discover its principles, I
realized that doing so was slowly making increasingly intelligible to me
precisely why, later in his life, Adler started to focus on understanding the
nature of philosophy as uncommon common sense.
He did so because, for years, he had been reading St. Thomas Aquinas's Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. Doing this had enabled him to understand that Aristotle and St. Thomas had considered philosophy to be an organizational psychology that initially grows out of the moral virtue of prudence within a culture.
Prudence is a species of uncommon common sense. Before
philosophy can exist in and grow out of a culture, the moral virtue of prudence
(which teaches a student docility) must first dominate within that culture as a
principle of cultural wonder: a cultural enterprise of habitually wondering about
proximate causes of organizational existence, unity, and
behavior. A culture develops this skill by training its general population
to listen and speak, read and write prudentially, via the moral virtue of
docility/teachability.
The first course taught in the Wisdom Academies is an
orientation class (Ph 101) that focuses on the contents of my book How to Listen and How to Speak: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants to Renew Commonsense and Uncommonsense Wisdom in the Contemporary World. The reason
for this is because, as I explain below, all the principles for the Wisdom
Academies flow out of psychological principles contained in this book and in my
earlier monograph, How to Read a Difficult Book: A Beginner's Guide
to the Lost Art of Philosophical Reading.
They do so precisely because, like Adler before me, I
consider philosophy to be a complicated psychological habit (a behavioral
organizational psychology) that grows out of the more primitive habit of
wanting to listen for understanding (wondering about) causes of organizational
existence, unity, and action (behavior). Philosophy is behavioral
organizational psychology. This is what the leading Ancient Greek
philosophers and Aquinas understood it to be.
All the introductory courses in the Wisdom Academies involve
using principles first taught in Ph 101 (the orientation course) and Ph 102
(the course about how to read a difficult book) to develop within students
rigorous psychological habits of active listening and speaking, reading and writing.
The orientation course inculcates in students psychological
habits of actively and attentively listening in order philosophically to take
notes, and speak conversationally with others to achieve understanding—how to
listen in order to learn by instruction from another. Doing this imparts the
moral virtue of docility, teachability/prudential learning, within a student.
Ph 102 adds more psychological principles/habits of
understanding to those learned in Ph 101 by inculcating in students the general
method/generic habit of how ‘actively to listen’ in order ‘actively to read’ a
difficult philosophical book for philosophical understanding. It develops in a
student the psychological habit of learning by becoming more than an excellent
listener and speaker—becoming an excellent reader and writer.
Once these active psychological habits/skills of
listening and speaking and reading and writing start to be developed, they are
increased by applying them in 4 courses actively to listening to audios of, and
reading, note-taking, and outlining, 7 Platonic dialogues (Ph 103,
Plato’s, Ion, Euthyphro, Apology; Ph 104, Crito and Phaedo;
Ph 105, Meno, and Gorgias); and in 2 courses related to: 1) Aquinas’s
metaphysical teachings—Ph 106; and his metaphysical teachings for understanding
his ethics as a moral psychology—Ph 107.
Decades ago, I had discovered that the best way to
understand and read a difficult philosophical book for understanding is first
to rewrite it in outline form. St. Thomas does this in his commentaries
on Aristotle. A student does this by first finding all the arguments in a
philosophical work in their order of appearance.
In Plato’s dialogues this is done by first outlining the
characters in their order of appearance. After this is finished, a student
needs to find the first topic (the real genus, subject) about which the
character and Socrates start to talk. After doing this, a student needs to
identify each definition the character gives to Socrates related to the
definition and the examples to which he and Socrates apply the definition.
Socrates’ application of definitions to examples is his way of criticizing the
character’s arguments: an essential part of the Socratic philosophical method.
After having actively having: 1) listened to, read, and
understood the order of appearance of the characters, topics, definitions, and
examples the characters introduce into the dialogue, in the order of
appearance they introduce them, and 2) Socrates’ criticism of the way these
definitions are applied by the characters to examples—Socrates’
criticisms—philosophical reading of the dialogue is finally finished. By this
time a student should have mastered the dialogue, achieved an
understanding of the whole dialogue by comprehending precisely how
all its essential parts have caused it to be the organizational whole that
it is with the kind of unity it has.
Students in the Wisdom Academies do this sort of rigorous
reading of 7 Platonic dialogues; and many works related to the metaphysical and
moral teachings of Aquinas.
The Ph 101 orientation course teaches students how to listen
philosophically in order to take notes philosophically.
Taking notes and, after doing this, revising them
philosophically, teaches students how to outline philosophically—first
generically, then specifically, and, finally, in individual detail.
Learning this outlining skill teaches students how to write
philosophical articles and books.
No other school in the world teaches students with
this kind of philosophical rigor. This sort of reading is analogous to the way
a critic of painting by a Master identifies for a student how he or she has
used color geometrically to assemble line, figured bodies, and
spatial relations to compose a painting into a beautifully ordered whole.
The only way to master a difficult philosophical work or any
other difficult reading material is by rewriting it according to the order
of its topics and arguments. To do this, a person must first take notes!
AS ADLER UNDERSTOOD:
Philosophical listening is the first principle of
philosophical note taking. That is, it is the psychological habit that
must precede, be mastered before, philosophical note taking.
Philosophical note taking is the proximate first principle
of philosophical outlining. It is the psychological habit that must
precede, be mastered before, philosophical outlining.
Reading philosophical works for understanding is the
philosophical first principle for writing philosophical articles. It must
precede, be mastered before, writing philosophical articles.
Writing a philosophical article, especially one given as a
lecture followed by a question and answer period, is the philosophical first
principle for writing a seriously philosophical book. It must precede, be
mastered before, writing a philosophical book.
To me and to Adler, from whom I learned these truths, all
the above are a matter of uncommon common sense.
CEO, Aquinas School of Leadership, LLC
See course list for the WISDOM ACADEMIES Certificate in Uncommon Common Sense being offered by CWLAA starting in February 2022. CWLAA educational consultants may be contacted through the
Aquinas School of Leadership at:
peterredpath@aquinasschoolofleadership.com.
Syllabi for other
courses are presently being prepared. As they start to near completion, their
course descriptions will be added to this catalogue.
NOTE:
The Wisdom Academies consist of 2 main divisions: (1) an introductory Commonsense Wisdom Liberal Arts Academy (CWLAA) and (2) and advanced, professional Commonsense Wisdom Executive Coaching Academy (CWECA). The first is the gateway to the second. It provides students with rigorous training in understanding the nature of commonsense first principles and precisely how to apply them in individual situations. With this training in hand, our students become prepared to work with established national and international leaders to so as to be able to learn from them in more advanced ways than is possible for students of other academic backgrounds.
To
make more accessible direct contact between talented students and talented
educators, as far as possible to remove administrative interference between
these individuals, CWLAA/CWECA courses are not designed according to
the standard Enlightenment Western college and university 15-week format of
semesters and weekly lectures, which include mandatory final exams, term
papers, and final grades. They are designed according to an Eastern
Martial Arts format of 15 Lessons, which, according to the level of advancement
of the student and permission of the instructor, may be done in 15, or
more or less, consecutive days or weeks. With the permission of the
educational consultant, students in the same class can complete the same
course asynchronously. The same class may also have rolling
enrollment for the same class, or the educational consultant may continuously
open one or more other section(s) throughout the year.
Once a student completes the 15-Lesson course, the educational consultant will meet via email, phone, or in some other online manner, to provide the student with an assessment of the level of development in mastery of the subject the student has achieved. He or she is not required to give the student a final exam, term paper, or a formal grade. He or she may do so if he or she wishes. Instead, if he or she wishes to do so, the consultant will tell the student the grade the consultant would have given had this class been a college or university course. As in Martial Arts, the educational consultant will tell the student whether he or she is ready for advancement to another course within the CWLAA or CWECA curriculum. If a student wants a final exam or to do a term paper and the consultant has not assigned one as a course requirement, the consultant and student may enter into a separate agreement for those activities for which the consultant will be financially remunerated.
Once a student acquires the
equivalent of 60 college or university credits (completion of 20 CWLAA courses,
including required course Ph 101), the student will be eligible to apply for a
Certificate of Completion in the CWLAA part of the
CWLAA/CWECA program. At present, no higher level CWECA courses are being
offered.
Ph 101 is the orientation course
for the CWLAA/CWECA program. Taking it is not required before enrolling in
other classes. It explains in detail the nature and rationale for creation of
this program. For this reason, only those students who have taken this course
will be granted a CWLAA Certificate of Completion, which is required to be
admitted to Level 2 (and beyond): Global Leadership and Executive Coaching
courses to be taught in CWECA.
Finally, the date of 15 September
2021 does not indicate the start of a new semester. It marks the formal start
of the CWLAA/CWECA academies as open to the general public for enrollment in
courses, for which they can pre-register. Also, this date does not indicate the
first day of classes for any course; although it might be the start date for
this or that course, if students have registered for a course before 15
September 2021. Educational consultants decide the start and end dates
for their respective courses. These do not necessarily run consecutively with
other courses in the program.