Department Requirements
Requirements for the Major in Philosophy
The major consists of eight courses, which must include Philosophy 111, 112, and 223; at least one other course from the group numbered in the 200s; and two from the group numbered in the 300s. The remaining two courses may be from any level.
Requirements for the Minor in Philosophy
The minor consists of four courses, which must include Philosophy 111 and 112 and one course from the group numbered in the 200s. The fourth course may be from any level.
Independent Study and Honors
Intermediate and advanced students are encouraged to pursue independent studies in topics of interest that do not happen to be covered by current course offerings. Students doing independent study for credit work closely with a member of the department during the course of a semester and produce a significant piece of writing at the end. Recent topics of independent study projects include: Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, metaethics, the meaning of life, Islamic medieval philosophy, and international justice.
Philosophy majors with a departmental grade point average of 3.3 or better at the end of the junior year are eligible to undertake an Honors project in philosophy. Honors students write a project proposal in September, and then carry out a two-semester independent study culminating in an Honors thesis. Recent Honors projects include: Incommensurability and Untranslatibility: Incommensurability in the Works of Thomas Kuhn, After the Implosion: On How to Read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Gödel and Penrose: the Implications of Incompleteness, and An Examination of Michael Ruse’s Darwinian Approach to Philosophy.
The Advanced Seminar
Each spring the department offers an Advanced Seminar open to Junior and Senior majors and minors. This class is team-taught by two members of the department. Each year we pick a topic of current philosophical interest and read recent books and articles on that topic by two or three leading philosophers. The authors then visit Bowdoin, each giving a public lecture and joining the seminar for a three-hour class.
Recent topics include Color and Consciousness, Moral Theory, and Freedom and Moral Responsibility. Visiting authors have included Alex Byrne (MIT), Daniel Dennett (Tufts), Shelley Kagan (Yale), Richard Moran (Harvard), Samuel Scheffler (Stanford), and Susan Wolff (UNC).