Learning Outcomes

The Philosophy Department teaches students to do many things.  Most centrally, our students are able to:

• Identify, interpret, analyze, and critically evaluate a wide range of philosophical problems, claims, positions, and viewpoints, both historical and contemporary.
• Write clearly and persuasively about the same and, in so doing, to become active and responsible members of an academic community of other writers.
• Understand philosophy; even where this leads to no philosophical solution nor to any practical result or application, to fully and deeply understand philosophy is valuable in itself and partly constitutive of a life lived well.
• Make connections between the distinctive way of knowing that the study of philosophy produces to the ways of knowing found in other academic disciplines.
• Apply philosophical reasoning to the study of Infusion, whether in philosophy classes or elsewhere.

We believe that these central aims for our teaching regularly produce additional skills in our students.  These include the ability to

• Identify problems of any sort and discover and implement creative and responsible solutions to them.
• Make connections between the academic study of philosophy and one’s life.
• Reason logically, and speak clearly and persuasively, about matters important to the living of one’s life.