Business, Science & Technology
BST
What is the vocation of businessperson? What is the meaning and purpose of society? Can technology serve the common good? Guided by these questions, Honors students are given the opportunity to put their interest in business and technology into dialogue with the liberal arts and the fundamental questions of human life.
Grounded in the Augustinian tradition and humanities enquiry, BST aims to understand the role entrepreneurial and technological skills have in establishing a just society. Fulfilling the Villanova Mission, BST shapes students who “commit to the common good” and who can “apply the knowledge and skills of our students and faculty to better the human condition.” While engaging with these three topics, the sequence takes an approach grounded in the liberal arts to help students consider how to understand the goods of business, society, and technology.
Students in BST take two semesters of the Augustine and Culture Seminar together and then take a special Ethics course shaped by moral questions regarding business, society, and technology.
Course Sequence
What is a good person? This course is an interdisciplinary investigation of the transcendental “good.” The course explores the question of the good of humans aiming to shed light on what the good life is. The course centers around questions about love, the origin of the good, the reality of the good, the meaning of a good death, and the possibility of a good beyond this life. “The Good” course is first in the learning cohort sequence, since it addresses foundational questions of Philosophy. Readings include Plato’s Symposium, Augustine’s Confessions, and Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.
What is the meaning and purpose of society? How can technology serve the common good? Where our first ACS semester centered on the question of the good, our second semester focuses on topics related to society and technology. In so doing, we consider society and its shared objects of love and how technology can serve and distort human life. We will consider ways that both society and technology can go wrong. Through this we aim to understand how to foster a flourishing society with a human-centered technological approach. Readings include Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots, and Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas.
Our three-semester sequence concludes with an in-depth engagement with ethics as it relates to business and economic topics. This is not a business ethics course in a standard sense but a continuation of our attempt to understand the good and how that shapes our business lives. The course centers on general questions about ethics and the good life, but we explores these themes through a closer examination of how we understand business activity and our participation in economic systems and institutions. The course engages a wide variety of thinkers from Thomas Aquinas to Martha Nussbaum and texts from the Old Testament to Milton Friedman.
Villanova University
Garey Hall 106
800 Lancaster Ave.
Villanova, PA 19085