Summer Seminars
Exploring Foundational Questions
Each year, institutions from across FEHE’s extensive network host a wide range of summer seminars for high school students, undergraduates, graduate students, and young professionals.
Ranging in subject matter from moral philosophy to modern bioethics, and metaphysics to marriage, our summer seminars offer a vision of human flourishing at both the individual and the societal level. The seminars offer unique opportunities for rigorous study of classical traditions and contemporary questions, conducted in a spirit of intellectual friendship, free inquiry, interdisciplinary study, and truth-seeking.
Summer Seminars Schedule 2026
- For Undergraduate Students, For Graduate Students and Young Professionals
The Machine Has No Tradition
The distinctive feature of life today is that our lives appear to be technologically liberated from nature. We live in human-made physical, social and virtual [...]
- For Undergraduate Students
First Principles
This two-week intensive seminar examines two topics central to the work of the Witherspoon Institute, namely, (1) the purpose of the university and (2) friendship [...]
- For High School Students
Catholicism and the Common Good
When the Stranger says: ʺWhat is the meaning of this city? Do you huddle close together because you love each other?ʺ What will you answer? [...]
- For Undergraduate Students, For Graduate Students and Young Professionals
Natural Law and Public Affairs
The last several decades have witnessed a revival of natural law theory among English-speaking moral and legal philosophers. This ethical tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas [...]
- For High School Students
Principles of American Constitutionalism
This seminar for upper-level high-school students and rising college freshmen will be taught as a one-week seminar. Participants will study the fundamental questions of equality [...]
- For Graduate Students and Young Professionals
The Moral Foundations of Law
This is a one-week seminar for current law students, graduate students who are studying jurisprudence in related fields (e.g., political science, philosophy), and recent law [...]
- For High School Students
Moral Life and the Classical Tradition
- For Graduate Students and Young Professionals
Statesmanship in American History
In cooperation with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and hosted and funded by the James Madison Program, the Statesmanship in American History summer [...]
- For Graduate Students and Young Professionals
Thomistic Seminar
The topic of the 2026 seminar is “Happiness and Well-Being.” In the Aristotelian tradition, happiness is understood as successfully living a good life rather than [...]
