Philosophy

Department overview

You may be asking yourself several questions right about now: What is philosophy? What does philosophy offer? It presents the history of the human search for understanding over a period of 3,000 years. It also explores some of the basic human needs and experiences in enterprises called, rather formidably, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics. These investigations probe questions such as these:

Epistemology - How do we know what we know and can we be certain that our knowledge is reliable?
Ethics - Why do we call some things good or right and hold others to be bad or wrong?
Metaphysics - What is fundamentally real in our complicated world and is there some reality that holds together its contradictory appearances?
Aesthetics - How can we reach reasoned agreement about beauty and creativity and their place in our world?

The study of philosophy is too important to be confined to the training of professional philosophers. Our program offers pre-professional training (nursing, law, and business, to name a few), but it also seeks to engage with a broad range of students in doing philosophy. Whatever your interest, our underlying aim is to aid your development as an inquiring, judicious, intellectually self-reliant human being.