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| Welcome to the Philosophy Department!
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“The feeling of a philosopher is wonder, and philosophy begins in wonder.”
-Plato, Theaetetus
As the fundamental discipline of the western academy, philosophy has left us a potent legacy. Ancient Greek thinkers initiated philosophy as a way to live out their commitment to the pursuit of truth, and they equipped philosophy with the methods of critical speculation and logical argumentation. In our time, philosophy continues to guide human inquiry toward truth. Operating within the methods described above, philosophy adopts an attitude of openness by concerning itself with a broader range of objects than any other field. Nature, ethics, knowledge, logic, metaphysics—philosophy engages all these areas. It does so in the hope of attaining understanding for its own sake, and for the sake of informing and guiding our actions. All of this makes philosophy integral to meeting Newman University’s “goals for baccalaureate graduates,” among which are the requirements that graduates “reason critically,” “make informed ethical judgments,” and “possess an intellectual habit of mind.”
If, as Socrates said, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” then it falls to philosophy to provide the tools and the motive for such an examination. The task of faculty in the Department of Philosophy is to help our students to initiate their own practice of philosophy. This means that we are responsible for modeling how one goes about seeking truth, and for doing so in an open-ended attitude of wonder that is genuinely philosophical. |
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