Philosophy Department Mission
As philosophers at Santa Clara, our mission is to build a collaborative educational community seeking truth, meaning, understanding, liberation, wisdom, and other values crucial to human persons. We do this through teaching, research and service, using texts, ways of knowing and ways of being offered by the world’s wisdom traditions.
Our teaching develops student potential, offering important applicable knowledge, skills, and habits. These are both intellectual and moral: critical thinking, effective written and verbal communication, anticipating challenges, the moral formation of whole persons, creative problem-solving, as well as deeper senses of justice and integrity. Our students engage with issues that have multiple aspects or solutions using systematic rigorous approaches, while finding or creating meaning in life. We engage students inside and outside traditional classrooms while bridging and contextualizing questions from other disciplines including the sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts, engineering, business, and education.
We research and publish in core areas of inquiry including: ethics, reality, knowledge and truth, race and ethnicity, love and relationships, the law, democracy, technology, healthcare, and philosophical ways of life. Our research pushes inquiry and problem-solving in novel directions; while we look to the past and the present for guidance, we address emerging problems as well as new ways of addressing enduring problems.
Through our service, we identify, articulate and evaluate hidden or problematic background assumptions, such as what is truly valuable and worthwhile. We aim to model and promote philosophical ways of living not only among our students but also among our colleagues and communities.
Student Learning Objectives
- Students apply normative philosophical frameworks to the evaluation of normative problems/issues in reasonable/philosophically informed ways.
- Philosophy majors and minors demonstrate the critical thinking skills needed to articulate, justify, and defend philosophical positions, in increasingly sophisticated ways.
- Philosophy majors and minors demonstrate the critical thinking skills needed to articulate, justify, and defend philosophical positions, across diverse discursive contexts.
- Students can identify major philosophical figures and are able to articulate central concepts and themes in the history of philosophy, both western and non-western.