The MA Comprehensive Examination is organized by the faculty member responsible for the MA Comprehensive Course that academic year, who will be called the Faculty Co-ordinator. Written questions will be solicited from all faculty in the Center. At least two faculty members must grade each question. In consultation with the Director of the Center, the Faculty Co-ordinator will average the grades on the written test. Students must pass the written test with a minimum grade of “B- ” to proceed to the oral examination. If the written examination is failed, it must be retaken within six months.

The oral component of the examination lasts one hour and is set by three faculty examiners chosen by the Faculty Co-ordinator in consultation with the Director of the Center. A grade for the oral examination is determined by the three examiners. If the candidate passes the oral with a minimum grade of “B- ”, the written and oral grades are compared by the three examiners and then by vote they determine an overall grade for the MA Comprehensive Examination. This grade is entered as the grade for the MA Comprehensive Course. If the oral examination is failed, it must be retaken within six months.

• Plato, Republic 
• Aristotle, Physics or On the Soul; and Nicomachean Ethics

Medieval/Latin Philosophy (3 authors must be chosen, one must be Aquinas)

• Augustine, Confessions or City of God (selections) or Free Choice of the Will and De magistro
• Anselm, Proslogion 
• Aquinas: Metaphysics: De ente et essentia and Summa theologiae Ia, qq.1-7, 12-13, 44-46; Person: Summa theologiae Ia, qq. 75-87; Ethics: Summa theologiae Ia-IIae, qq. 1-5, 55-67, 90-100
• Scotus: Questions on the Prologue to the Ordinatio
• Suarez: Metaphysical Disputations (selections) 
• Poinsot: Treatise on Signs or De primo cognito

Early Modern Philosophy (2 authors must be chosen, one must be Kant)

• Descartes, Meditations
• Spinoza, Ethics I, II 
• Hobbes, Leviathan (selections) 
• Locke, Second Treatise on Government or Essay Concerning Human Understanding (selections) 
• Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding or Enquiry Concerning The Principles of Morals 
• Kant, Prolegomenon to Any Future Metaphysics or Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals or one of the three Critiques

Late Modern Philosophy (2 authors must be chosen, one from A and one from B)

A.

• Hegel, Philosophy of Right or Phenomenology of Spirit 
• Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals 
• Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling or Either/Or 
• Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology or Being and Time or On the Essence of Truth 
• Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences

B. 

• Peirce, “A New List of Categories” and “A Neglected Argument for the Existence of God” 
• Frege, “Sense and Reference”; Strawson, “On Referring"; and Russell, “The Theory of Descriptions” 
• Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus or Philosophical Investigations, Part I. 
• Kripke, Naming and Necessity and Identity and Necessity

Recent Thomistic Philosophy (2 authors must be chosen)

• Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge 
• Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience or Being and Some Philosophers 
• Lonergan, Insight or Verbum 
• MacIntyre, After Virtue or Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry 
• McInerny, Aquinas on Analogy 
• Rahner, Spirit in the World 
• Simon, The Tradition of Natural Law or Freedom of Choice or The Great Dialogue of Nature and Space 
• Anscombe and Geach: Three Philosophers