Introduction

Abstract

Dante, in Convivio, notes that ‘the supreme desire of all things, and the one first given to them by nature, is to return to the first cause.’¹ Liberal arts education expresses this desire for a universal understanding, beginning in the experience of awe and wonder at the natural universe and of life within it. This experience expresses itself in the doubt that accompanies curiosity, the same doubt that leads the great minds of Western antiquity to ask how and why the universe was formed, to seek its first principles — those universal principles which are the condition of the possibility of the existence of anything and everything. For Aristotle, the sensation of awe and wonder leads thought to enquire ‘about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and the stars, and about the genesis of the universe.’² Experience then leads thought to associate different ideas, leading in turn to wisdom regarding universals. As such, says Aristotle, wisdom deals with ‘the first causes and the principles of things.’³