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Our Philosophy About Philosophy
Question:
Is happiness the same as pleasure?
Answer:
If you suspect that the answer is no, you will enjoy taking our philosophy
courses. If you think the
answer is yes, you
need to take our philosophy
courses.
If you are a high school student or have never had a course in it, you may
think philosophy is an intellectual mind-game that deals with questions like "If
a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound?". So we
should tell you right away that Socrates, who was in a sense the founder of
philosophy, was killed for doing it--and people don't usually get killed for
playing mind-games.
People do tend to get upset if you ask basic questions
that require examining the meaning of human existence.
This is what Socrates did, and what we try to do in our philosophy courses at
Salisbury University.
In fact--and here we are going to brag a bit--our department is one of the
few departments on the East Coast that is primarily devoted to addressing
questions about values
and questions about the meaning of human
experiences. In our classes, students are invited to talk and write about
their lives
and about the moral, religious, and political questions that perplex them.
There is hardly anything that we don't talk about
in our courses. (If you want to see a list of courses go to the "philosophy"
listing under "Programs".)
Because of the kind of questions we address in our courses, students often
seek to continue our classroom conversations after classes are over. We are
lucky to have our own Philosophy House on campus, which provides a wonderful
atmosphere for both small-group and one-on-one dialogue.
Thinking, writing and speaking about basic
questions is, in our view, what a humane education is all about. These questions
have tremendous relevance to all intellectual
disciplines--and we explore this relevance in the courses that we teach with
other departments (such as Nursing, Political Science and English). The ability
to rigorously examine ideas and critically evaluate conflicting views which you
will develop by doing philosophy, is an ability that is of pivotal importance in every intellectual discipline. This is one reason why
many of our students find philosophy to be tremendously helpful in their other
areas of interest. (Many of our students combine their philosophy major with a
major in English, Social Work or Psychology.)
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