Philosophy Major

One of the major goals of a liberal arts education is to help students initiate reflection on the meaning and significance of their own experience as individuals, as members of community, and as beings in the cosmos. This reflection begins primarily with the attitude of the perplexed knower: One knows enough to ask questions but does not know enough to find answers to them. Such questioning is the attitude of the philosopher; it realizes that it is more important to understand the questions themselves than to know all the answers. As the liberal arts education ultimately brings one to philosophy, philosophy brings the basic experiences and issues into question. What is truth? What can I know? What can I hope for? What is useful? What is moral? How can I learn to distinguish what is unique to me from what I have in common with others? How shall I act to achieve worthy goals for myself and others? Asking these fundamental questions is the task of philosophy.

Philosophical deliberation on these fundamental questions develops an understanding that is sensitive to the human as it finds the place of values in society and reality. The philosophy program asks the students’ own questions, and, so questioning, students put themselves in question. Such studies reveal a remarkable unity—the unity of the venture of questioning and of one’s experience as a questioner. Philosophical studies help students to develop self-awareness, self-confidence, and toleration grounded in a strong sense of responsibility. In short, to take control of their lives.

Unlike any other discipline, philosophy continuously returns to its own fundamental questions and answers, as well as the questions of other disciplines. The department emphasizes both the history of philosophy and the practice of philosophizing. With the history of philosophy, students discover the background and the issues; with the practice of philosophizing, students develop skills of analysis and methodological self-awareness in solving contemporary problems of interpretation, ethics, society, and science. Through its investigation of the underlying assumptions and structures of other disciplines, philosophy examines and develops the perceptions of reality and the structures of thought from which social sciences, sciences, art, and literature have emerged.

The questions asked in the historical works of philosophy, as well as the contemporary, are worthy of study in themselves, but these questions can also lend assistance to other scholarly and professional aspirations. Because of their broad-based perspectives, students of philosophy are able to find the unifying theses that tie together the strands of the liberal arts education. Because philosophy develops analytic, synthetic, and organizational skills, philosophy students have an excellent acceptance rate to both law school and medical school. Philosophy also lends itself to other careers that call for problem-solving abilities, leadership, and clarity of expression and thought.