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Theme Explanation

The logo on the cover, a modern rendering of the Seven Liberal Arts, visually connects contemporary studies in the Arts and Sciences to ancient and medieval conceptions of higher learning, which often divided the liberal arts into the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, harmonics or music, and astronomy or cosmology). In the medieval period, theorists also frequently envisioned Philosophy as an overarching area of study linking all knowledge branches. The theme of this year’s COAS Research Conference, “The Shoulders of Giants,” deliberately alludes to a series of successive historical statements that assert both the advancement of knowledge and its dependency on previous thinkers and their findings.

“Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs sitting [standing] on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance.” 

John of Salisbury, Metalogicon (1159)

Isaac Newton, a letter to Robert Hooke (1676)