The Marshall University Philosophy Department has three full-time faculty members, all having earned Ph.D. degrees from top philosophy schools. We are unique in the tri-state area in three ways. We offer courses in three of the major contemporary philosophical styles, analytic, continental, and pragmatist philosophy, rather than just one. We are part of the only interdisciplinary degree program in the area, team-teaching with the departments of classics and religious studies. (In other words, we benefit from the insights of three disciplines in studying philosophy in its various historical and cultural contexts.) And our degree program is organized as a “contract” with each major, in which the student designs a large part of her or his own program.

Our faculty members are deeply familiar with a wide range of the history of philosophy from Plato to the present. They are also at the cutting edge of their various specialties, doing adventurous research, and being in contact with a variety of leading philosophers. This creates an exciting environment for our students, and unusual opportunities for our majors to make contacts and enter graduate school. Recent graduates have gone on to graduate study at nationally respected schools, in philosophy, English, law, divinity and art history.

More generally, entering into philosophy enables us to participate better in the “dance of life”: to appreciate the joyful things more fully and widely and to steer through the hard things more successfully. It is at this deep level of developing what is meaningful in individual and communal life, more than any other, that our faculty members’ research and teaching contribute to exploring illuminating and helpful ground.

Our department hosts a very active Philosophy Club, run by students, who meet every second week and tend to have discussions late into the night. The Club is always open to new suggestions about what to do.

Students in our department also edit and publish Escalade, a journal which publishes student non-fiction essays once a year.

In addition to these many wondrous things, we are part of the Marshall Study Abroad exchange program, exchanging students with the Philosophy Department at Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge, England.

For further information, please feel free to contact our faculty members.

*Philosophers left to right: Aristotle, Alain Locke, John Locke, Julia Kristeva, Descartes, Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry Thoreau