The Fall 2025 course in the Institute’s ongoing Continuing Education Series will be “Virtue Ethics: Aristotle to MacIntyre.”  It will be held on Wednesday evenings from September 10 to December 3, 2025.

What does it mean for a human being to “flourish”? How and is human flourishing related to the virtues or “morality”? What, if anything, does it mean to “be moral” and how are the virtues related to happiness? These questions motivate this course’s survey of the virtue ethics tradition in western thought, centering on a close reading of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Alasdair MacIntyre’s seminal work After Virtue, an analysis of modern moral discourse which situates Aristotelianism in contemporary life and society. It will also explore works by other important thinkers such as Josef Pieper and Elizabeth Anscombe. Students will come away from the course with a basic grasp on the nature and place of the virtues in the western philosophical tradition and in Catholic moral teaching.

The course will be taught in person and offered online simultaneously. The in-person class meetings will be in McGivney Hall Room 006 on The Catholic University of America’s campus.

The class fee is $150. To register, please complete the online registration form. Payment can be submitted via check, cash, or credit card. To submit a credit card payment, please click here.

This course can be taken toward renewal requirements for VCEA licensure. Numerous high schools in the Archdiocese of Washington accept the course for CEU credits.

If you have questions, please contact [email protected] or call 202.526.3799.