The goal of the Department of Philosophy is to enable students to develop thoughtful attitudes toward life and the world through a confrontation with the thought of great philosophers. To treat such problems as the nature of our individual and social lives, the nature of the world in which we live, and the nature of our apprehension of, and response to that world.
All philosophy courses will include a close reading and analysis of primary sources and a substantive writing component.
Our faculty agree on the necessity of having someone wiser than themselves in the classroom at all times. So together with their students they read the Great Books: works from the long shelf of those who challenge us or are clearly our superiors, from Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas through Descartes, Shakespeare, Hume, Kant and Nietzsche to Freud, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Lewis and Tolkien, Camus and Solzhenitsyn.
"Coming into college I had always been interested in thinking about the "big" questions of life but never found an avenue to pursue this. Taking philosophy classes at bet36365体育 gave me a chance to learn from some of the best thinkers in history concerning these questions, and this learning was largely facilitated by the department's excellent professors. They were always willing to help during office hours, and the amount of feedback they provided for written work in their classes has only been matched by my dissertation supervisor."
