PHILOSOPHY'S ROLES IN THE UNIVERSITY
Synoptic View of Life as a Connected Whole
Throughout the ages and in spite of varying approaches,
philosophical thinking has aimed essentially at the same
basic objectives--a panoramic world view or life view.
(Locke 1989, 104)
The philosophy department incorporates Locke's view of
philosophy into its approach to problem solving. To the
degree possible its members introduce philosophy in ways
that show philosophy's connections to other subjects and
to practical problems of life. Part of the task that philosophy
at Howard sets itself is to show how the lives students
lead here is intimately connected to their lives after
Howard. If students see what they do at Howard as a series
of burdensome, useless requirements rather than a foundation
for studies they will enthusiastically pursue for the rest
of their lives, then Howard cannot inspire its graduates
to carry out their missions.
The department does not view philosophy as a subject that
can stand in isolation from other subjects. All subjects
are bound together as subcultures of a single culture of
thinking. All have a common aim: the organization and representation
of experience. For particular purposes it is possible to
distinguish one subject from others, but all blend together
as bands of a single spectrum.
Philosophy's Integral Connections To Other Subjects
Defining philosophy as the self-reflection, foundation,
and integration of the arts and sciences, the department
concentrates on four traditional areas of philosophy: ontology,
epistemology, axiology, and praxiology. It seeks to answer
the questions covered under these four areas: what exists,
how can we know it, what is its value, and how should we
live our lives?
The department views philosophy as a game plan for a liberal
arts education. It justifies the mandatory elements of
the curriculum by showing the interdependence of intellectual
cultures. Courses on these cultures are justified not because
they make the student "well-rounded" or "liberally
educated," but because each course depends on the
others for its proper exposition.
Philosophy should raise the important questions of life
in the hope that students will use their other courses
in a compulsory liberal arts curriculum to help address
these questions. Philosophy cannot engage in its work without
the assistance of all other academic subjects. But the
reciprocal is true. Without philosophy, research in other
subjects cannot be ground breaking.
Justification Of A Liberal Arts Curriculum
A good liberal education will link each subject to every
other in the university curriculum. Every subject has its
own philosophy as the set of assumptions and principles
for choosing the most promising research questions and
methods in that subject. Viewed as an evolving body of
speculative knowledge rather than immutable perennial wisdom,
philosophy must be taught not only in historical contexts
but also with liberal doses of artistic imagining. As Einstein's
research made so clear, shattering the strongest bonds
of ignorance sometimes makes imagination more important
than evidence.
Philosophy's Attention To Cultures
[African Americans] have built-up a distinct and unique
culture, a body of habit, thought and adjustment which
they cannot escape because it is in the marrow of their
bones and which they ought not to ignore because it is
the only path to a successful future. . . . What is a culture?
It is a careful Knowledge of the Past out of which the
group as such has emerged: in our case a knowledge of African
history and social development--one of the richest and
most intriguing which the world has known. (Du Bois 1973,
143)
The department fosters a cultural approach to philosophy.
Students are encouraged to start with self-examination
of the philosophies they bring to their courses, and connect
these philosophies to their cultural contexts.
The department encourages students to conduct their philosophical
reflections in the contexts of the global experience of
humanity. For this reason the department's courses link
familiar cultures to unfamiliar cultures.
Philosophy aims at liberation, but we are free only to
the degree that we can choose, and we can only choose what
occupies our attention. Our cultures constrain our attention
in most powerful ways. We can make free choices to follow
these constraints only if we are intimately grounded in
the possibilities of alternatives. In a philosophy department
at an historically Black university we should be particularly
interested in those alternatives that show us how choices
dictated by mainstream cultures may be wrong on their own
grounds.
A good liberal education will focus much attention on
the evolution of both academic and social cultures and
take particular pains to show how cultures always stand
on the shoulders of their predecessors. In another century
it might have been possible to imagine that we live our
lives in the vacuum of our own cultures, but in this and
the foreseeable centuries, to live is always to live "in
the face" of the other. And to live without the knowledge
that other cultures have gained and given to our own is
to live a less than full life.
Departmental Efforts To Connect With The Wider Curriculum
Because philosophy's search for the whole of life must
include all its parts, the department's introductory courses
examine both the relations of philosophy to other academic
subjects as well as a range of different cultural expressions
of philosophy. The whole of life should be equally accessible
to all students, regardless of their diverse cultural backgrounds
(both academic and social) and their particular passions
and talents. And if philosophy is synoptic, then it must
cover its territory in ways that make it possible for students
to continue the coverage for the rest of their lives.
The department encourages its students to take courses
in history, anthropology, politics, economics, and foreign
languages in order to focus on the full spectrum of human
cultures. Cultures have their own ways of binding their
separate elements together, of giving diverse activities
their foundations, and of bending life in certain directions.
A philosophy course should show how cultures embody philosophies.
In their few short years with the department, students
simply cannot pay enough attention to the cultural expressions
of philosophy to do them justice, but they can broaden
their knowledge through their life experiences after their
formal education.
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