The Department of History, Philosophy, and Liberal Studies prepares students for their roles as global citizens and for various career opportunities. We offer a variety of majors and minors to help students develop valuable critical thinking and research skills that will make them employable in a wide range of career opportunities. Students from our programs are prepared to pursue career paths in education, law, museum studies, government, non-profit management, marketing, business, media, and other fields. Our programs also provide outstanding preparation for graduate and law school.
Philosophy investigates many aspects of our thinking and experience. In classes such as ethics, logic, and aesthetics, philosophy examines procedures and standards, if there can be any, for proper behavior, thinking, and feeling. Metaphysics examines the nature of space and time and the conditions of experience. Epistemology looks at how we know what we think that we know and the limits of knowledge. Many areas of our experience have separate philosophical inquiries dedicated to furthering our ability to discuss and understand them: language, art, education, religion, science, love, gender, mind, history, politics, law, and mathematics. Many famous thinkers have offered advice on how to pursue inquiry or catalogued the results of their own efforts, and the department offers regular seminars in the work of a single thinker, such as Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, among others.