Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Quadrivium
Summary
From the time of Plato through the Middle Ages, the quadrivium (plural: quadrivia) was a grouping of four subjects or arts—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—that formed a second curricular stage following preparatory work in the trivium, consisting of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Together, the trivium and the quadrivium comprised the seven liberal arts, and formed the basis of a liberal arts education in Western society until gradually displaced as a curricular structure by the studia humanitatis and its later offshoots, beginning with Petrarch in the 14th century. The seven classical arts were considered "thinking skills" and were distinguished from practical arts, such as medicine and architecture.
The quadrivium, Latin for 'four ways', and its use for the four subjects have been attributed to Boethius, who likely coined the term. It was considered the foundation for the study of philosophy (sometimes called the "liberal art par excellence") and theology. The quadrivium was the upper division of medieval educational provision in the liberal arts, which comprised arithmetic (number in the abstract), geometry (number in space), music (number in time), and astronomy (number in space and time).
Educationally, the trivium and the quadrivium imparted to the student the seven essential thinking skills of classical antiquity. Altogether the Seven Liberal Arts belonged to the so-called 'lower faculty' (of Arts), whereas Medicine, Jurisprudence (Law), and Theology were established in the three so-called 'higher' faculties. It was therefore quite common in the middle ages for lecturers in the lower trivium and/or quadrivium faculty to be students themselves in one of the higher faculties. Philosophy was typically neither a subject nor a faculty in its own right, but was rather present implicitly as an 'auxiliary tool' within the discourses of the higher faculties, especially theology; the separation of philosophy from theology and its elevation to an autonomous academic discipline were post-medieval developments.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.