Philosophy

Ask the big questions. Think the big ideas.

Philosophy explores the complex and ever-evolving questions that we face in our everyday lives in a rational and critical way. It addresses fundamental issues—relevant to all disciplines—about the nature of truth, knowledge, justice, meaning and beauty.

You’ll find that the big questions of philosophy are universal and can be applied to the significant issues facing humanity and the ethical dilemmas we each face every day. The study of philosophy can be applied to virtually any discipline, like medicine, science, politics and law.

All disciplines employ reasoning in pursuing knowledge but philosophy is unique in explicitly exploring the nature of reasoning and its relation to the pursuit of truth and practical wisdom.

—Colin Macleod, Chair

Join the conversation and find your edge in philosophy

UVic Philosophy

1 week ago

Victoria Colloquium Friday! Speaker: Dr Melvin Rogers (Brown University) Title: Being a Slave of the Community: Race, Domination, and Republicanism Friday, March 8th at 2:30pm Fraser Building (Law) Room 152 Abstract: Any effort to understand approaches to justice that rest on principles of non-domination would do well to reflect on those who have sought to address racial domination. In particular, the resources of 19th century African-American political thought have much to offer. In the 19th century African American intellectuals, seeking to discover how to undo and ward off racial domination, drew on two different strands of the philosophical tradition of republicanism. In the process they produced a third strand in which republicanism is linked to racial equality. A look at this body of work offers us the chance to recover resources for contemporary projects of justice, while also requiring us to revise traditional accounts of when and where republicanism, as a political theory, has waxed and waned. It will turn out that the work of building a political theory for justice as non-domination also requires undoing forms of domination reflected in the historiographic tradition. My lecture will recover this tradition in the African-American political thought while raising doubts about the inadequacy of the current revival of republicanism in addressing racial domination.

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UVic Philosophy

2 months ago

Colloquium Friday! Friday, January 11, 2019 2:30 pm Clearihue A303 Dr. Zoey Lavallee, City University of New York (CUNY) Title: Toward a Theory of Craving Abstract: I contend that craving is a necessary condition of addiction. Accordingly, investigating the nature of craving is a worthwhile endeavor that can bring to light important information about the nature of addiction generally. While craving is acknowledged as important by most contemporary theories in the philosophy of addiction, as it stands, the phenomenon of craving is undertheorized. I make the case that craving is best characterized by the following features: craving is a type of desire that is implicitly a two-place predicate, and its object is experience; craving has a heterogeneous phenomenology; cravings are necessarily occurrent desires, and they are necessarily felt; and, cravings are motivational states whose motivational force comes from both propositional content and felt-quality. It is precisely because cravings are this kind of desire with this kind of content that they are so pressing in addiction, and often extremely difficult to resist.

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Ask the big questions. Think the big ideas.

All disciplines employ reasoning in pursuing knowledge but philosophy is unique in explicitly exploring the nature of reasoning and its relation to the pursuit of truth and practical wisdom.

Join the conversation and find your edge in philosophy

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