The Faculty of Arts provided a basic education for all students, which from the sixteenth century onwards lasted two years. Some general lectures were given in the Vicus Artium, a private house purchased by the university in 1426. However, most of the students were taught in one of the four pedagogies: The Castle, The Lily, The Falcon or The Pig. Students, often fifteen or sixteen year old when they entered the Arts Faculty, had to be surveyed and were lodged in one of the four pedagogies or in colleges which were founded for students from a specific region.
It was a constant concern of the faculty board that the content of the lessons given in these four pedagogies was as uniform as possible. At the same time, the students showed great commitment to the pedagogy where they were staying, as is evident from their student notes.

In the fifteenth century, the courses were still mainly based on the traditional medieval curriculum of the seven liberal arts, with trivium (grammar, rhetoric and logic) and quadrivium (arithmetics, geometry, astronomy and music theory). For the trivium, the emphasis was on logic: from the very start, students had to spend nine months to courses on logic. Grammar was hardly taught, since students had been taught grammar at the (local) Schola Latina. Rhetoric was one of the subjects taught at the Vicus, as was ethics, which did not belong to the seven artes liberales. The quadrivium had already been replaced in the sixteenth century by the courses on Physics, which were all based on Aristotle's natural philosophy. Physics was the most important subject of the second year, taught for eight to nine months.

In the seventeenth century, and especially from 1658 onwards, changes took place primarily in the subjects of natural sciences. The influence of René Descartes (1596-1650) then definitively broke through in Artes education, and became even stronger after 1670, despite his conviction by the Leuven theologians in 1661. This innovative movement continued into the eighteenth century, with increasing attention being paid to experimental education through demonstrations, both in the pedagogies and in the Faculty's physics laboratory. Every pedagogy had its own collection of scientific apparatus. From 1764 onwards one can even speak of an 'enlightened' curriculum with regard to natural science.

The end of the Old University also meant the end of the Faculty of Arts. From the State University, which was founded in 1817 under Dutch rule, and continued until 1835, the Faculty of Arts was split into the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters (history) and the Faculty of Sciences (history).