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mission
Departmental Mission Statement
The Philosophy Department understands its primary functions to be preserving, transmitting, scrutinizing, and augmenting the literature, methods, ideas, and issues that constitute the traditions of philosophy.
The Department regards the teaching of its undergraduate and graduate courses as equally significant. The Department also invests the same seriousness in the teaching of its lower division courses as it does in the teaching of its upper-division courses. The Department's Liberal Education Requirement courses are robust philosophy courses like the other courses in the philosophy major.
At the graduate level the Department offers a two-year program leading to the Master of Arts degree. The graduate program in philosophy is designed to provide opportunities to pursue intensive, in-depth study within the discipline of philosophy, with particular attention given to developing an appreciation for the varieties of philosophical methods, perspectives, and modes of analysis, and their relation to the methodological concerns and interests of other disciplines. The M.A. program offers course of study in three concentrations for persons pursuing a terminal master's degree in philosophy, for persons pursuing doctoral work in philosophy, as well as for persons wishing to supplement and enhance their work in other disciplines and degree programs. The concentrations offered are in the areas of Culture/History, Ethics/Practice, and Interpretation/Method.
