Contact

Kate Reynolds
Administrative Assistant
Office: Casey Building 4E
Phone: (206) 296-5470
Email: reynoldk@seattleu.edu

Burt Hopkins
Professor and Chair
Office: Casey Building 427
Phone: (206) 296-5469
Email: bhopkins@seattleu.edu

Introduction

The study of philosophy begins with questions that are as personal as they are universal: What truths can I know? How should I live? Who, or what, am I? Where is my place in the grand scheme of things? To respond fruitfully to such questions requires training in critical habits of mind, learning from the rich traditions and the great minds that have reflected on such questions and engaging in lively discussion with a community of inquirers. Seattle University undergraduate philosophy courses communicate the value of philosophy and impart knowledge of its most influential figures. Courses in the curriculum help students to bring their own intellectual concerns into dialogue with great minds of the past and present, and to hone skills of reasoning and argumentation that make that questioning illuminating, reliable, and useful.

Winter Quarter Course Descriptions

Two-Year Schedule 

 Upcoming Conferences

Jesuit Philosophy Summit

Seattle University will be hosting a summit on the role of philosophy, and in particular the Department of Philosophy, in the Jesuit University of the twenty-first century, and to invite you or representatives of your department to attend. The summit will take place on April 16^th and 17^th of 2009.

More details about the conference

Call for papers

Hotel arrangements

Fall Philosophy Lecture

Dec 1, 2008

4:00 p.m.

Wycoff Auditorium

Jason Wirth

"Idiocy: Milan Kundera and the Entitlements of Thinking"

My address seeks to discern the relationship between philosophy and the novel and does so in a preliminary fashion through a consideration of the work of the Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera. It will take up this question, however, from a rather oblique angle, namely through a meditation on the figure of the idiot in philosophy and the novel. With regards to this figure, it will consider the work of Nicholas of Cusa, Descartes, Deleuze, Bakhtin, and Stanislas Breton on the philosophical side, and Ignatius of Loyola, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, and, as the leitmotif, Milan Kundera, on the literary side. What does the figure of the idiot reveal about the entitlements of thinking, both philosophically and novelistically?