Graduate Program
Strengths of the Program
The Philosophy program at Emory aims to produce teachers and
scholars with a broad and systematic understanding of the history
of philosophy. We welcome a diversity of approaches to the
study of philosophy, including: analytic, continental, historical,
literary, multicultural, and pragmatic. Above all, we seek
to prepare our graduate students to make scholarly contributions
in their areas of expertise and to become responsible members
of the philosophical community.
In keeping with the tradition of the distinguished Emory philosophers
Charles Hartshorne and Leroy E. Loemker, our department has
both historical and systematic interests. We are particularly
strong in four areas:
History of Philosophy
The expertise of our faculty covers all of the canonical
periods in the history of philosophy: Greek and Roman antiquity
(Patterson and Strange); the Middle Ages (Zupko); the Renaissance
(Verene); Montaigne and Rousseau (Hartle); continental rationalism (Goldenbaum); modern empiricism
(Livingston); Kant (Makkreel); nineteenth-century philosophy
(Carr, Makkreel, Sullivan, and Verene); and twentieth-century
philosophy (Carr, Flynn, Fotion, Makkreel, McCauley, and Risjord). Courses
and seminars are regularly offered on each of these periods.
There are also informal reading groups for students interested
in particular authors and texts.
Continental Philosophy
Several faculty members are noted for their contributions
to philosophical scholarship in the continental tradition,
especially concerning the thought of Hegel (Verene), Dilthey
(Makkreel), Husserl (Carr), Cassirer (Verene), Sartre (Flynn),
and the Frankfurt School (Sullivan), as well as in the philosophy
of consciousness (Carr), existentialism (Flynn), hermeneutics
(Makkreel), phenomenology (Carr and Flynn), Foucault (Flynn)
and postmodernism (Willett).
Culture, History, and Social Theory
Philosophers have long emphasized the importance of society
in their reflections on human existence, raising questions
about culture, history, and theory in the humanities and social
sciences. We take these questions very seriously and examine
them from a number of interdisciplinary angles. In fact, Emory
has more faculty members working in this field than any other
philosophy department in the United States. Included here are
topics such as aesthetics (Makkreel, Patterson, Willett), critical
theory (Flynn, Sullivan, Willett), culture and myth (Verene,
Willett), philosophy of history (Carr, Flynn, Makkreel), hermeneutics
(Makkreel), literature and philosophy (Hall, Verene, Willett),
methodology of the social sciences (McCauley, Risjord), cognitive
science and philosophy of psychology (McCauley), race studies
(Risjord, Willett), religious tradition and religious experience
(Zupko), and technology (Verene). Emory philosophers are committed
to pursuing all of these topics in new and exciting ways.
Ethics and Political Philosophy
Our Department also has a number of people working in ethics
and political philosophy, with expertise in the American tradition
(Sullivan, Willett), feminist ethics (Willett), Hellenistic
ethics (Strange), Kant (Makkreel), meta-ethics (Fotion), recent
continental ethics (Sullivan, Willett), virtue ethics (Hall),
the political thought of Montaigne and Rousseau (Hartle), and
Hume’s ethics and political philosophy (Livingston).
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