General Information about the
Study of Philosophy
What is philosophy? What do philosophers do? Surprisingly, even philosophers ask these questions. Not because they do not know what they are doing, but because asking questions is what philosophers do. ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’, ‘What is it to be good?’, ‘What is the nature of reality?’ are some other philosophical questions.
You might notice that other disciplines ask similar questions. Theologians also ask why there is something and what goodness is. Physicists ask what reality really is. What sets philosophy apart from other disciples is how it approaches these questions. It uses reason, rather than sacred texts or empirical experiment. In particular, philosophers employ the main form of reasoning; argumentation, when answering these questions.
The main goal of the philosophy department at EvCC is to equip students with the basic tools and tool usage of a philosopher; to make explicit the argumentative aspects of thought that provide the analytic filter through which the merit of many ideas and claims, found in daily life, in the study of another intellectual discipline or in philosophy itself, may be judged.
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