Abstract

The notion of liberal arts, since Aquinas, has dramatically changed in its content, method, and aim. Today the liberal arts are understood synonymously with liberal education or general education, which calls for its restoration and rediscovery. For Aquinas, the seven liberal arts—which by his time were already composed of the trivium (ie, grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and quadrivium (ie, geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy)—are contrasted to the mechanical arts and the speculative sciences. The current conception of the liberal arts as holistic education came from a gradual conceptual shift in the last two centuries. Liberal arts studies have been progressively reduced to teaching “subjects” rather than giving students the tools, the “art,” of learning, of liberal education. The loss of the sense of the liberal arts—especially its Thomistic sense—brings certain repercussions in how the nature of “education” is understood. As such, this article aims to (1) clarify the situation of the liberal arts,(2) retrace the history of the liberal arts,(3) explore its Thomistic conception, and (4) consider the need to recover them as necessary for the proper order of learning befitting man.