The Faculty of Arts was one of the four traditional divisions of the teaching bodies of medieval universities, the others being Theology, Law and Medicine. The Faculty of Arts was the lowest in rank, but also the largest as students had to graduate there to be admitted to one of the higher faculties.
The Faculty of Arts took its name from the Seven Liberal Arts: the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectics) and the Quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy).
In the universities of continental Europe, this faculty has more often been named the equivalent of 'Faculty of Philosophy' (e.g., Norwegian: Det filosofiske fakultet, Slovene: Filozofska fakulteta). Nowadays this is a common name for the faculties teaching humanities.
Famous quotes containing the words faculty of, faculty and/or arts:
“The dramatic art would appear to be rather a feminine art; it contains in itself all the artifices which belong to the province of woman: the desire to please, facility to express emotions and hide defects, and the faculty of assimilation which is the real essence of woman.”
—Sarah Bernhardt (1845–1923)
“Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)