From the earliest times all students for higher degrees had first to graduate in the junior faculty of arts. In medieval times the curriculum in arts consisted of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and logic), for the BA, followed by the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy) which, with the three philosophies (moral, natural and metaphysical), formed the basis of the MA course. The term is now commonly used, often in the phrase ‘arts and humanities’ in distinction from the natural and social sciences.
