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Fields of Focus

Amidst our diverse teaching and research projects, one also finds overlapping and complementary interests. In certain instances, this complementarity forms a field of focus that involves several faculty working in an area, often across various traditions. Such fields of focus allow our students to pursue a single problem or set of problems in a variety of classes, engage it from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, and, should they choose to, write a dissertation in that area with the help and support of multiple faculty members.

The following briefly describes current fields of focus in the department. Of course, our interests are always developing in new directions, and the following list has not limited the areas of specialization for our graduate students.

Aesthetics

Faculty working in this area share the conviction that questions pertaining to aesthetics lie at the heart of all philosophical inquiry and human existence. Aesthetics is not only about the creation, experiencing, and judging of works of art, but also about everything that gives form, value, and significance to all aspects of human experience. Aesthetics, therefore, is broadly construed as bearing on issues surrounding cognition, meaning, knowledge, truth, and politics. In its broad scope it covers the full range of artistic expression from literature to myth to painting to music to film. Because of our comprehensive understanding of aesthetics as crucial to what makes us human, our courses cover the full range of figures from a wide variety of traditions and orientations. One is thus just as likely to encounter Heidegger as Dewey, Danto as Adorno, Kant as Nietzsche, Aristotle as Collingwood, Plato as Derrida. One course will emphasize recent analytic developments, a second will build to a pragmatist understanding, while a third will employ the lens of critical theory.

Because of current faculty research and interests, recent courses have focused on themes such as the following: embodied aspects of art and aesthetic dimensions of experience, aesthetic cognition, art as a form of social and political criticism, issues pertaining to the aestheticizing of the political, truth and knowledge as related to works of art and to aesthetic experience, aesthetic judgment as a model of all human evaluation, art and emotion.

American Philosophy

American Philosophy at the University of Oregon is a valuable way of doing philosophy as well as a historical tradition to be understood. As a method, American philosophy begins with an epistemological and ontological focus on human beings in interaction with each other and their environments. From the perspective of interaction, this approach also affirms a commitment to pluralism, the framing role of human communities, and the inseparability of knowledge and value. Our approach is explicitly grounded in the work of the classical pragmatists---Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey---and the work of their contemporaries, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Jane Addams. Our approach to the American tradition also embraces less recognized thinkers who contributed to the development of pragmatism and many others who share a general commitment to pluralism, the importance of community, and issues raised by life in the diverse societies of the Americas. As a result, American philosophy at Oregon is a living philosophy focused on present problems continuous with a long and rich tradition of philosophical inquiry grounded in American experience.

Coursework and research focuses on three connected areas. The first focuses on using the approach of American philosophy to address current philosophical concerns in theories of knowledge, ethics, aesthetics, race and gender theories, embodiment, and science studies. The second area expands the boundaries of American philosophy by exploring its relations with continental, analytic, and feminist philosophy historically and thematically. The third area expands the tradition itself by recovering the history of American philosophy, especially the role of African American, Latin American, Native American, and American feminist thought as part of the tradition.

Continental Philosophy

"Continental Philosophy" concerns a cluster of questions and themes prevalent in 19th and 20th Century European thought, for example, the nature and possible end of metaphysics; critical social and political theory; ethics as first philosophy; the interplay of time, history, and narrative; the grounds of embodiment, gender, and the situated subject; and the entwinement of art, myth, and truth.

While certain patterns of inquiry orient our pursuit of these issues (e.g. critical theory, feminism, genealogy, hermeneutics, phenomenology, and post-structuralism), Continental philosophy at Oregon remains in conversation with other philosophical traditions. For example, present concerns include the relation of antiquity to thinkers such as Hegel, Schelling, and Heidegger; dialogue between Anglo-American and Continental feminist discourses; opportunities of mutual enlightenment and constraint between phenomenology and the cognitive sciences; conversations between Marxism and deconstruction on the one hand and pragmatism on the other; the relation of phenomenological descriptions of nature to contemporary evolutionary ecology; and Levinas’s relation to earlier generations of Jewish thought.

Amidst such dialogues, which are the hallmark of our department, the close reading of texts and figures is also esteemed, particularly with regard to Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, and Schelling in the 19th Century, and Adorno, Beauvoir, Deleuze, Derrida, Husserl, Heidegger, Irigaray, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre in the 20th. One will thus find courses that work exclusively with one thinker or text as well as courses that move across texts and traditions.

Environmental Philosophy

Courses in environmental philosophy investigate the various meanings of the terms “nature” and "environment," explore the intellectual history of these concepts, and examine what it means to have aesthetic experiences of and ethical relations with the larger world. At its core, our approach to environmental philosophy places equal weight upon metaphysical and ethical inquiry, convinced, as we are, that justice can only be served if one knows the nature of the beings with whom one would live justly.

Our approach to issues in environmental philosophy is multifaceted. Among the perspectives that receive a hearing in our effort to explore the moral and ontological standing of the human and more-than-human world are critical animal studies, critical theory, deep ecology, ecofeminism, environmental justice, indigenous philosophy, land ethics, phenomenology, pragmatism, and social ecology. Such inquiries are also complemented with questions and insights drawn from the history of philosophy, thus bringing a thoroughly historical perspective to reflection on the environment. Our interests include philosophical work on eco-phenomenology, the question of our animality, the role of place in human experience, and Native American perspectives on the environment understood within the broader context of Native thought. Recent courses include Animality, Ecophenomenology, Ecotheory in Philosophy and Art, Environmental Philosophy, Environmental Aesthetics, Native American Philosophy, Philosophy of Ecology, and Philosophy of Disaster.

The philosophy department works closely with the University’s Environmental Studies Program, including offering a joint doctoral program in Environmental Science, Studies, and Policy with a focus in Philosophy.

Ethics

We approach ethical issues from a broad range of perspectives, our aim being to develop the richest possible account of human moral experience. We employ methods and insights drawn from theories of cognitive development, from social and cultural studies, from the sciences, from feminist discussions of gender, and from literature and the arts.

Faculty research and teaching interests currently include the following orientations: empirical research on moral development and moral reasoning, naturalized approaches to ethics, virtue ethics, pragmatist moral theory, feminist ethics in relation to issues of freedom and responsibility, ethical issues in literature and the arts, peace and conflict resolution studies, and critical theory. We are strong in many parts of the history of moral philosophy, especially in the Enlightenment through the twentieth century.

Recent courses in ethics have addressed figures such as Kant, Hume, Nietzsche, Levinas, and Iris Murdoch. Graduate seminars have focused on ethics through literature, ethics in ancient philosophy, and naturalistic ethics.

Feminist Philosophy

Feminist Philosophy is best understood as a way of doing philosophy that arises out of and seeks to articulate the emancipatory aspirations of women. Feminist philosophers work within and across other philosophical traditions. To say that our work is "feminist" is to acknowledge that gender can be a central lens through which we conduct inquiry. Feminist philosophy considers what it means to enter the philosophical project as a sexed, raced, embodied, historically and culturally situated subject. The particular strengths of our department in feminism include phenomenology, embodiment, intersubjectivity, philosophy of science, pragmatism, poststructuralism, ethics, and politics, and we have particular interests in philosophies of sexuality and intimacy as well as the intersections between feminist theory, race theory, and other liberatory theories.

Recent courses in Feminist Philosophy include author’s courses on Beauvoir, Irigaray, Judith Butler, Monique Wittig, and Collette Guillaumin. Topics have included Feminism and Aesthetics, Feminist Ethics, Feminist Political Philosophy, Feminist Phenomenology, and Sex/Gender: Nature and Culture Before and After the Linguistic Turn.

History of Philosophy

Research into the history of philosophy at the University of Oregon is itself a philosophical task, inseparable from the questions, discourses, and theories that we take to define philosophical practice. Many courses take an explicitly historical approach to the philosophical themes and questions they address. The general interest in our department in the history of philosophy opens up the question of the diversification and continuity of philosophical inquiry, and affirms the need to be receptive to the many differing accounts of the transmission of thought and practices. If the history of philosophy always implies some sort of philosophy of history, then historical research becomes a compelling way to address difference itself.

We require all majors to fulfill requirements in a series of history courses, stretching from antiquity to the 19th century. Doctoral candidates complete a history paper as part of the comprehensive examinations. In addition, this overall commitment to history is continuous with our interest in the philosophical themes that emerge in the 20th century. A prominent feature of the department’s course offerings is the “author’s course,” which devotes an entire term to an in-depth study of one or two philosophers. These courses comprise a variety of philosophers, including the Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Hume, Locke, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bergson, Dubois, James, Wittgenstein, Freud, Husserl, Dewey, Heidegger, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Beauvoir, Derrida, Irigaray, Deleuze, and Butler. The department also offers a number of courses which approach the material with an unmistakable emphasis upon context and history. Such courses include Eastern Philosophy, American Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, and Feminism.

Latin American Philosophy

Description coming soon.

Native American Philosophy

Description coming soon.

Peace and Conflict Studies

Description coming soon.

Philosophical Psychology

Our approach to mind is multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary. We conceive of 'mind' as irreducibly social and cultural dimensions of individual organisms in interaction with their environments, and we seek to understand what it means to be human in the most profound sense of the term. We therefore draw from a broad range of perspectives, including physiology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, phenomenology, race and gender studies, and the entire field of social sciences. Faculty members have strong ties to members of the Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences and have offered team-taught collaborative courses through the Institute.

Faculty interests in our department currently revolve around three principal topics. The first concerns personal identity and the development of a sense of self, as seen from the perspective of the biological sciences, cognitive science, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and hermeneutics. What does it mean to be a person and how do we develop our mature sense of selfhood? A second orientation focuses on the psychology of human and animal conceptualization and reasoning. This encompasses our study of the roots of cognition in patterns of sensory and motor experiences and activities as well as the way in which the mind is necessarily embedded in a network of social relations. Faculty members have brought in perspectives from developmental research to enrich philosophical reflection on this problematic of embodied social cognition; they also have been doing work on how people think and on problems of cognitive dissonance. The third focus in on issues of character formation, especially in the development of moral understanding and deliberation. This involves the study of such topics as virtue, moral development, character, and moral reasoning.

Philosophy of Race

Philosophy of Race is a descriptive and critical inquiry that draws upon history, political theory, social theory, public policy, literature, and the the biological and social sciences. The philosophical contribution can be divided into cultural criticism, ethics, political and social philosophy, and philosophy of science. Topics include: the reality and ontology of race in society and science, analyses and remedies of racism, the phenomenology of racialized existence, racial identtities, and different conceptions of pluralism and multi-culturalism. Depending on their interests, students can develop an AOS or AOC in philosophy of race, as either a distinct subject, or inflected by scholarship in the history of philosophy, feminism, political philosophy, phenomenology, American Philosophy, Latin American Philosophy, global studies, and so forth.

Social/Political Philosophy

Many of our faculty and the courses they teach reflect a strong interest in social and political philosophy. We are thus interested in a wide array of issues, including agency, freedom, and subjectivity; art, the aesthetic, and the political; civil rights and discrimination; community; conflict resolution; cultural criticism; environmental justice; liberalism; the state and legitimation; and violence and war.

Given the make-up of our faculty, we approach such matters from a variety of perspectives, including deconstruction, environmental philosophy, feminism, Marxism and critical theory, peace studies, the philosophy of law, post-colonial thought, pragmatism, and race theory. Moreover, such inquiries are often pursued in dialogue with the history of philosophy (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Locke, and Hegel) and across disciplinary boundaries (e.g. ethnic studies, legal and social theory, and women’s studies).

Recent courses in Social and Political philosophy include courses on Aristotle’s Politics, Derrida and Nancy, Feminist Political Theory, Law & Society, Philosophy of Disaster, Nonviolence, Rawls and Rawlsiana, and Topics in Critical Theory.