Dr. D. C. Schindler, Professor of Metaphysics and Anthropology, will lead a seminar at The Kateri Institute for Catholic Studies in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  His seminar is part of the Kateri Institute’s series “The Life of the Mind” with the transcendentals as this semester’s theme.

Event Description:

The Kateri Institute for Catholic Studies offers a home for faculty, staff, and students at the University of Michigan to integrate their studies with the Catholic intellectual tradition.

The Life of the Mind is about asking the “big questions” of existence. Why is the natural world so beautiful? Why does it have an intelligible order? Why is there a world at all? The series is also concerned with “meaning of life” questions that can be postponed (especially in our endlessly distracting society) but never completely eradicated. Why are we here? Why must we die? How should we live? In short, the Life of the Mind series is devoted to contemplation of some of the most important questions ever asked.

Truth. Beauty. Goodness. Throughout the centuries, thinkers have called these cosmic values transcendentals because they were believed to exist universally beyond space, time, matter, and history, and because all human beings longed to know them. In the classical world, the transcendentals were understood to harmonize the soul with a well-ordered universe, a prerequisite to human flourishing. Medieval thinkers associated the transcendentals with the triune God of Christianity and believed that human beings, as imago Dei, possessed an innate ability to know truth, love beauty, and desire goodness. How do these values look to us now? How might they speak to our intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical lives as students, teachers, and citizens of the world? This series will examine the transcendentals as a category of thought that is just as important now as it ever was. Indeed, they make life worth living.

For more details, visit The Kateri Institute for Catholic Studies website.