About the Department

The Department of Philosophy is located in the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, but a student in any college can minor (or double major) in philosophy. The philosophy department invites all university students to consider philosophy’s course offerings as a complement or supplement to any program of study.

To educate humanity, not just to offer courses in philosophy as one of the humanities, is an aim of the philosophy department at Kent State. Any person studying philosophy is urged to use philosophy’s courses:

1. To enhance analytic and critical capacities to facilitate understanding and articulation of careful prose;

2. To entertain and scrutinize options without mere, habitual or impulsive adoption or rejection;

3. To increase capacity to invent options to stated alternatives;

4. To start learning for life;

5. To broaden horizons and develop reflective and imaginative capacities; and

6. To begin appreciation of a discipline that is more than 2000 years old but a discipline where questions of method and subject matter are persistently considered.

Career and Scholarship Opportunities

Philosophy is not a specifically job-oriented major the way a major in journalism or nursing might be. Still, students majoring in philosophy find themselves well educated in skills attractive to a range of potential employers. Students with a philosophy background are able to make fine distinctions, to follow and construct arguments, to express themselves well in writing and to read demanding texts with depth and care.
A scholarship is provided through the Honors College. Please consult the Honors College for details.

 

What a Student Should Expect From Philosophy Courses

Each student’s active participation is expected in any philosophy course, large or small. A student in a philosophy course should expect to be asked to think, not just to listen, and to be allowed to express his or her own ideas and views as opposed to repeating or agreeing with a correct answer. A student should expect also to be pressed to formulate reasons for specific views and explore consequences of those and other views. Also, a student should expect to become more able to identify beliefs and values, their origins and consequences.

Instruction in philosophy aims to help a student develop and self-impose a discipline and a daring that will risk and sustain encounters with classical, relatively congenial thinkers, as well as authors who challenge assumptions and outlooks. Philosophy helps a student search out not only similarities but also differences in human assumptions and objectives.

Course Offerings and Faculty

Philosophy’s course offerings stress diversity with depth in classes that explore a wide range of ethical, epistemological and metaphysical concerns. Courses are taught by faculty differing not only in scholarly concentrations but also in teaching modes, life concerns and styles of interaction in instruction or advising. Students are urged to sample broadly from both course offerings and faculty interests.
The philosophy department participates in a spectrum of interdisciplinary programs: American studies, Asian studies, British studies, classical humanities, German studies, health-care ethics, Hellenic studies, paralegal studies, pre-law, religious studies, women’s studies and the writing program.

Philosophy faculty activities have three aims: excellence in teaching, rigor in professional research activities and generosity and service to students, to the university and to the broader community. Full-time faculty have doctorates from the universities of California (Riverside), Illinois, Massachusetts, Notre Dame, SUNY-Stonybrook, Washington and Waterloo; from Boston, Emory, Northwestern, Purdue, Vanderbilt, Wayne State and Yale universities. Faculty also participate in and contribute leadership within the American Philosophical Association, Society for Phenome­nology and Existential Philosophy, Nietzsche Society, American Society for Value Inquiry, American Academy of Religion, Ohio Philosophical Association, International Society for Chinese Philosophy and Society for Women in Philosophy.