College of Liberal Arts

INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE 
(University Core Curriculum)

Dr. Laurence Lyons Murphy
Ambler Executive Program Coordinator
267-468-8221

The University Academic Core Curriculum, required of all undergraduate majors at Temple, is divided into categories that include using language effectively, handling quantitative data as well as qualitative analysis, understanding our cultural and political history, and developing an understanding of a culture and/or a language other than our own.  The Core examines as well diversity in our own society as well as the depth of knowledge and influences that shape our values, perspectives and the character of the individual.  Students at Ambler can complete the Core Curriculum on Ambler Campus.  For more information on the Core, go to: http://www.temple.edu/ucc/

Intellectual Heritage, the most distinctive feature of Temple's Core Curriculum, is a writing-intensive, two-semester course sequence which introduces students to “seminal” as well as highly influential texts in the intellectual tradition.  Areas of study range from ancient Greece to the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, and Renaissance Studies in the first section, through the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Modernism in its second.  Such dynamic and influential social leaders, thinkers and artists as Pericles, Plato, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Homer, Machiavelli, Galileo, Shakespeare, Locke, Douglass, Darwin, Freud, Marx, Gandhi, and King are examined.  Novels, treatises, drama, poetry, music, the arts as well as philosophical texts and sacred literature are explored. A unique Intellectual Heritage Program is offered exclusively at Ambler, and its mission is to learn from, as well as encourage, edify, inform, and stimulate Ambler’s unique intellectual collegial community and environment.  For more information on the Intellectual Heritage Program at Ambler go to: http://island.temple.edu/ihambler/