The Undergraduate Program
 
The Master's Program
 
Colloquium Series
     
 

The Undergraduate Program

The bachelor of arts degree teaches invaluable skills — critical thinking, sound reasoning and the capacity to analyze and solve complex problems — that will help students in any career. . . > more

   

The Master's Program

The new one-year Master's Program provides students with a basic grounding in philosophy that ranges across the major areas of the discipline and is designed primarily for those who wish to do advanced work in philosophy as well as enhance their credentials in pursuit of their chosen careers . . . > more

   

Colloquium Series

The colloquium series brings well-known philosophers to campus to discuss their most recent work . . . > more

 
 

About the Department of Philosophy

 
 

The Department of Philosophy offers students training in philosophy. The skills that philosophy develops — critical thinking, enlightened use of one's imagination and the capacity to analyze and solve complex problems — are essential in the pursuit of any discipline.

The philosophy program is divided into five basic fields:

  • Logic — a study of reasoning; learning to evaluate how well our premises support our conclusions.
  • Ethics — a study of human potential in terms of living a good life and investigating what that might entail.
  • Metaphysics — a study of being in the world; bringing into question the basic criteria for determining what is real.
  • Epistemology — a study of how we know what we know, what can be known and the limits of knowing.
  • History of philosophy — the study of major philosophers, periods and movements in the development of philosophy.

The Department of Philosophy features a distinguished the faculty whose areas of interest cut across a variety of sub-fields such as metaphysics and epistemology, ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of language, logic, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, early modern philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy of law.

The Department offers both a major and minor in philosophy as well as an Honors track, allowing students who maintain a certain grade point average in the courses they take in philosophy to write a Senior Honors Thesis.

The Department is also starting a one-year Masters Program in Philosophy to enhance students' chances to be accepted into a top-ranked Ph.D. program in Philosophy as well as advance their careers in some other area or discipline.

Announcements of colloquia, public lectures, conferences, and other events and activities in philosophy throughout the Boston area are regularly exchanged among departments, and organizers via an email subscription list created, maintained and run by the Brandeis Philosophy Department, connecting other departments in the area, among them, Harvard, M.I.T, BU, BC, Tufts, Wellesley, and the University of Massachusetts.