Summer Seminars

For High School Students

June 11-17, 2023 • Rider University (Men) and Cairn University (Women)

Moral Life and the Classical Tradition
The Witherspoon Institute

The Moral Life and the Classical Tradition Seminar is a week-long program for rising high school juniors and seniors as well as rising college freshmen interested in the ancient philosophical tradition and its influence in the Christian moral life. The seminar is offered to both young men and young women, although their seminars take place separately (see dates above). Both the young men and the young women study two tracks:

1. Classical Moral Philosophy: This track explores Plato’s Meno, Symposium, Apology, Crito, and Euthyphro as well as selections from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics.

2. Contemporary Issues in Moral Thought: This track consists of discussions and readings on the foundations of Judeo-Christian moral tradition, including the relationship of faith and reason, the Judeo-Christian tradition and scientific inquiry, sexual ethics, marriage and family, and biomedical ethics.

Both courses will consist of a great deal of discussion and interaction between the students and the teacher; therefore, students are expected to be well prepared by reading and understanding beforehand the assigned readings. Readings for the seminar will be provided about one month in advance of the seminar. Classes will be supplemented with quiet time for study and with extracurricular activities such as sports, cultural outings, and opportunities for spiritual reflection.

The Moral Life and the Classical Tradition Seminar is a challenging intellectual experience that brings high school students into direct contact with serious scholars of the humanities.

Application deadline: February 15, 2023

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June 11-17, 2023

Human Meaning And The Moral Life
The Austin Institute

What does it mean to be human? This question is more important than ever in our frenzied age of materialism, unbridled technological advancement, and moral upheaval.

High school students who have finished their sophomore or junior years are invited to participate in a highly-interactive, week-long seminar that plumbs the depths of the human person.

Each day, we will address a different aspect of what it means to be human.
Daily topics will include:

A human person is an embodied soul.
A human person changes over time, and not always for the better.
A human person has a conscience and a moral sense.
A human person strives toward a specific goal, happiness.
A human person must discriminate between competing claims.

Led by experienced fauculty members, students will examine these topics through both classical philosophical texts and literary works selected to put some flesh on the philosophical concepts we discuss. We will end each day with a concrete application of the concepts we have studied to some contemporary moral issue. For example, the day we discuss the human person as an embodied soul, we will wrestle with contemporary competing claims that the human person is nothing but matter and that the human person is primarily a soul whose material body doesn’t really matter that much. Armed with the wisdom of classic texts, students will leave better prepared to face the world – and more immediately, college.

Classroom instruction will be supplemented with outdoor activities, cultural outings, film viewings, and all the best that Austin has to offer, so students can expect a generous dose of fun mixed in with their study.

Application deadline: March 1, 2023

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June 26-28, 2023

How to Be Happy: Leisure, Festivity, Art, and Contemplation
Collegium Institute

High school students have never been busier. Early morning wake up, classes from 8am to 3pm, sports practice after that, music lessons, games on the weekend, extracurricular activities, college applications–seemingly every minute of every day in the life of a high school student conspires against relaxed, unstructured, unscheduled free time. Even during those rare moments of reprieve, more often than not the temptations of Netflix and YouTube, Instagram and Tik Tok, all just a touch or a click away, prove too enticing to resist. Is there no more to life than the ceaseless struggle to do well in high school, to get into a good college, to get a good job, to make money and gain prestige, all punctuated by the fleeting pleasures of online content consumption?

Happiness is the first and foremost question of the classical tradition of philosophy. How have Catholic thinkers engaged with that tradition and developed a robust answer for life? Join the Collegium Institute’s Young Catholic Leaders Initiative for a three day summer seminar on How to Be Happy: Leisure, Festivity, Culture, and Contemplation in University City from June 26 to June 28 as we explore this question through seminars and panel discussions, music and exhibits, communal service and feasting. Our guides in the quest for happiness include Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Annie Dillard and Josef Pieper.

Taking the seminal text Leisure: The Basis of Culture as our starting point, we will seek to establish a proper conception of work balanced by leisure as both concept and practice. We will then consider how art, the greatest fruit of leisure, moves us from reflection on the things of this world to the next by means of beauty. Lastly, we will focus on the final end of human beings, the purpose of life, namely happiness and contemplation in communion with God.

Priority application deadline: Monday, April 24th.

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June 26-30, 2023

Happiness, Virtue, and God in Philosophy and Literature
Houston Institute

What kind of person should you be? Anecdotally, it seems that a standard answer–perhaps the standard answer–that college students are given is: “you do you.” We might put the standard answer more precisely: there are no objective moral norms, so, as long as you don’t hurt anyone it’s all a matter of subjective preference. Moreover, we are told, what life is ultimately about is not something you can prove scientifically. So what hope is there of giving a meaningful answer?

Drawing from the perennial wisdom of ancient and medieval philosophy–especially figures like Aristotle and Aquinas–this seminar will challenge the standard answer and propose a vision of the crucial elements of a life that is happy in a deep way: virtue or moral excellence, friendship in its various modes (including marriage as a distinctive type of friendship), and knowledge of God. We’ll then engage the experiential dimension of these questions through literary works by authors like Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Faulkner, and Dante, all in pursuit not simply of evaluating the topics of happiness, virtue, and God but of seeking ways to live in deep happiness.

Some of the questions we’ll discuss include:

Why think there are objective moral norms? Is science the only or best way of getting at truth?
How do we achieve deep happiness? What is virtue and how does it relate to happiness?
What is marriage and why does it matter for society? How is it different from friendship?
Can we know God by reason? If God is supremely good and powerful, why is there so much suffering in the world?

Readings will be provided over a month ahead of time and students are expected to read them with care. Seminars will involve lively conversation about life’s most pressing questions.

Priority Application Deadline: March 15, 2023

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June 26 – 30, 2023

Principles of American Politics
The James Madison Program
Princeton University

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 and liberty in American political life. What have Americans meant by these principles from the founding to the present? What is their relationship with one another, with political power, with law, and with the private sphere of civil society? Are they in tension or in harmony? Readings will be in primary sources including The Federalist and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, as well as other basic texts from American history.

The seminar will be held off-campus at the Chauncey Conference Center where participants will be housed for the duration of the program. Opportunities will be available to visit historic Princeton and the campus.

Priority Application Deadline: February 26, 2023

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July 17-21, 2023

Ethics and Happiness
Zephyr Institute

At this summer’s camp we will ask the most basic of questions: What ought we to do, and what will make us happy? We will read short texts in various branches of ethics, including utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics, and apply these ethical theories to specific ethical issues, including the ethics of war, global economic justice, and human enhancement. We’ll also consider what understanding of ourselves and our purpose each theory implies. We’ll conclude with a discussion and debate about ethics and happiness. What is happiness, and does doing what is good and right make us happy? Join Zephyr Philosophy Camp and become wiser and happier this summer.

Application deadline: April 30, 2023

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July 31 – Aug 04, 2023

Pursuing the Common Good in the Digital Age
Abigail Adams Institute

Location: The Seminar will take place from July 31st – August 4th, 2023 with in person sessions at Harvard University’s CGIS Knafel building. Housing will be provided at Harvard College Dorms. There will also be field trips to the ICA and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museums in Boston.

Meals: Breakfast and lunch will be provided daily at the Seminar and dinner will be provided on two separate nights: on the first and last evenings of the seminar.

Cost: A registration fee of $525 is requested for overhead purposes and represents a small fraction of the true cost of the program. Reading material will be made available free of charge to the accepted applicants at least a month before the seminar. Scholarships are available, please submit your request here.

The seminar is open to rising senior high school students and those recently graduated from high school. Sessions begin at 9:30am. The seminar will be capped at fifteen participants.

Learn more and apply

For Undergraduate Students

June 15 – 17, 2023

Medical Ethics
Civil Discourse Project
Duke University

This seminar is designed for physicians in training and open to nursing students also. The seminar invites students to examine the central ethical questions that arise in the everyday practice of medicine and to interpret those questions through a moral framework drawing from both natural law and medicine’s traditional orientation toward the patient’s health. This framework will be contrasted with principlism and consequentialism as participants consider what sort of practice medicine is, whether it has a rational end or goal, and how medicine contributes to human flourishing.

The seminar will consider common clinical ethical cases to examine perennial ethical concerns that arise in the practice of medicine, including: the nature of the clinician-patient relationship; the limits of medicine, the meaning of autonomy, the place of conscience in the physician’s work, the difference between an intended effect and a side effect, proportionality, human dignity, sexuality and reproduction, the beginning of life, disability, end-of-life care, and death. The seminar aims to equip participants with intellectual tools that can help them discern how to practice medicine well in the face of medicine’s clinical challenges and moral complexities.

Admitted applicants will be housed in Duke dormitories and provided with meal cards. There is no cost to attending.

Faculty
Farr Curlin, MD, Duke University
Christopher Tollefsen, PhD, University of South Carolina

Eligibility
This seminar is open to entering and current medical students, as well as nursing students.

Application Requirements and Instructions:
All applicants must submit the following forms and documents via e-mail to john.rose@duke.edu.

-Curriculum vitae or resume, including your nationality.
-Cover letter discussing the reasons for your interest in the seminar, an overview of any relevant experience in the seminar’s topic. Please explain how you found out about the seminar.

June 18 – 23, 2023

Theorizing Man & Woman: From Plato to Judith Butler
The Abigail Adams Institute
Harvard Campus Housing TBD

Questions surrounding sex and gender, and sexual equality and freedom, are especially fraught these days, both personally and politically. Through close study of texts and seminar style discussion, this week long summer course moves from metaphysics to ethics to politics, asking the following questions with “sex and gender” foremost in mind:

Who am I? We explore questions of body and soul and the relationship between them by reading Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes, Judith Butler, Shulamith Firestone, and others.

How am I to live? We explore questions of education and wisdom, virtue and happiness, sex and marriage, and work and family obligations by reading Christine de Pizan, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sarah Grimke, Margaret Sanger, Dororthy Sayers & others.

How are we to live together? Finally, we explore questions of friendship and the common good, political freedom and legal equality, rights and duties, the purpose of law and the ends of government by reading Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Catharine MacKinnon & others.

Students can look forward to Professors Franks & Bachiochi, their personal guides to challenging texts. The seminar environment provides room for discussion & disagreement. We encourage a wide-range of viewpoints and responses to course material!

In the evenings, students will have time to explore Boston & build community. Alumni of the seminar stay connected after the week is over, many staying in touch two or three years later!

The seminar is open to advanced undergraduates (including graduating seniors), graduate students, and young professionals.

Learn More and Apply

June 27 – July 1, 2023

Natural Law and Public Affairs
The Witherspoon Institute
Princeton, New Jersey

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 offers a compelling alternative to the Kantian and consequentialist systems that have dominated modern moral philosophy. It also provides powerful rational defenses of moral principles often identified as Judeo-Christian, but common also to many great Muslim, ancient Greek, and Roman thinkers—indeed, principles dominant for centuries throughout the West.

This seminar will begin by engaging contemporary analytic work on the foundations and methods of natural-law moral reasoning. But the better part of it will be spent examining arguments that apply natural-law insights to a variety of moral and political issues, including religious liberty and the role of the state; justice in commerce and in communication; just war and capital punishment; abortion and euthanasia; and marriage and sexuality.

A recent participant says,

One of the strongest parts of the program were the intellectually stimulating readings and discussions that have real world applications. I enjoyed that the program was not discussing scholars from an ivory tower; rather, the program also emphasized current debates and action in public policy.

This seminar is open to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and young professionals.

Faculty:
Robert P. George, Princeton University
Christopher Tollefsen, University of South Carolina
Sherif Girgis, The Witherspoon Institute
Ryan T. Anderson, The Ethics and Public Policy Center

Application Deadline: February 15, 2023

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July 9 – 22, 2023

First Principles
The Witherspoon Institute
Princeton, New Jersey

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 and marriage. Unfortunately, these topics are often taken up from the vantage point of the culture wars, rather than from a patient, careful study of first principles. In these two weeks, we examine them from the background of philosophical anthropology, the metaphysics of the person, and a study of personal action and the human good. That is, from the perspective of the nature of being, the nature of knowing, and the nature of action, both the university and human relationships can be understood as having purpose and order insofar as they contribute to, and partially constitute, human flourishing. Absent a basis in a personalist anthropology, the university and human relations tend to seek alternative ends which are profoundly alienating and potentially destructive to persons and communities.

In the first week, the seminar examines traditional texts of metaphysics and epistemology as the backdrop for the university. In the second week, readings in human action and the human good provide a basis to examine friendship, sexuality, and relationship. Discussions are lively, vigorous, and socratic. The seminar includes guest lecturers and opportunities to interact with leading writers and public intellectuals in addition to regular faculty as well as cultural engagements with art, music, film, architecture. Participants will have the chance to explore Philadelphia and the historic and artistic opportunities the city offers.

Join students from around the country (and the world) in this intensive course on what it means to be a human who knows, acts, and loves.

This seminar is open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students.

Faculty:
R. J. Snell, Director of Academic Programs, Witherspoon Institute
David Corey, Professor of Political Science, Baylor University
Karen Taliaferro, Assistant Professor, School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, Arizona State University

Application Deadline: February 15, 2023

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July 9 – 14, 2023

The Machine has No Tradition
Abigail Adams Institute
Cambridge, MA

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 environments. The human condition is unbundled, disrupted, and made optional, even as supposed human distinctives like speech, creation, and rationality are automated, simulated, and replicated.

The spectre of technology raises afresh the question: what is a human being, and what does it take to stay one?

In this immersive weeklong seminar, we will grapple with the essence of technology and life in a technological society. We will explore how technology is reshaping our souls and our society and what a humanistic approach to technology might look like. We will engage with the best that has been said and thought about technology, while also hearing from both technology creators and practitioners of endangered human traditions.

The seminar will balance a focus on the increasing technological mediation of human consciousness on the one hand, and the shifting material foundations of social life on the other. We shall dive into the transformation of economy, psychology, politics, gender, religion and culture: in short, the transformation of humanity.

Readings will include Martin Heidegger, Rene Girard, Ivan Illich, Karl Marx, Marshall McLuhan, Carl Schmitt, & Others.

Application Deadline: April 16, 2023

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July 16 – 21, 2023

Foundations of Modern Political Economy
Abigail Adams Institute
Cambridge, MA

The main purpose of this seminar is to understand the fundamental ideas that shaped our open societies, which are built – at least in theory – on the principles of market economy and constitutional democracy. The seminar will focus on the contemporary issues and challenges as well as on the perennial questions such as:

How do we define the concept of justice?

How should we harmonize the demands for freedom and equality in contemporary society?

Furthermore, we will examine how to deal with the growing pressures on the ideal of free speech, as well as address the relevant question of scope of the concept of meritocracy in the twenty-first century.

The seminar encourages free and civil discussion among participants. Students are expected to have completed required readings.

Readings will include Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, John Rawls, John Milton, James Madison, Jacob Mchangama, & Others.

Application Deadline: April 30th, 2023

Learn More and Apply

For Graduate Students and Young Professionals

June 15 – 17, 2023

Medical Ethics
Civil Discourse Project
Duke University

This seminar is designed for physicians in training and open to nursing students also. The seminar invites students to examine the central ethical questions that arise in the everyday practice of medicine and to interpret those questions through a moral framework drawing from both natural law and medicine’s traditional orientation toward the patient’s health. This framework will be contrasted with principlism and consequentialism as participants consider what sort of practice medicine is, whether it has a rational end or goal, and how medicine contributes to human flourishing.

The seminar will consider common clinical ethical cases to examine perennial ethical concerns that arise in the practice of medicine, including: the nature of the clinician-patient relationship; the limits of medicine, the meaning of autonomy, the place of conscience in the physician’s work, the difference between an intended effect and a side effect, proportionality, human dignity, sexuality and reproduction, the beginning of life, disability, end-of-life care, and death. The seminar aims to equip participants with intellectual tools that can help them discern how to practice medicine well in the face of medicine’s clinical challenges and moral complexities.

Admitted applicants will be housed in Duke dormitories and provided with meal cards. There is no cost to attending.Faculty
Farr Curlin, MD, Duke University
Christopher Tollefsen, PhD, University of South Carolina Eligibility
This seminar is open to entering and current medical students, as well as nursing students.Application Requirements and Instructions:
All applicants must submit the following forms and documents via e-mail to john.rose@duke.edu.

-Curriculum vitae or resume, including your nationality.
-Cover letter discussing the reasons for your interest in the seminar, an overview of any relevant experience in the seminar’s topic. Please explain how you found out about the seminar.

June 19 – 23, 2023