Graduate student Mercer Gary has been accepted as a Visiting Scholar this summer at the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and Health Policy, which is a collaboration between the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and the Hastings Center. Her research project examines the normative limits of relationality through an analysis of the use of social robots in elder care, which is a continuation of work that she started as a participant in the Sherwin Nuland Summer Institute in Bioethics at Yale in 2018.

Congratulations Mercer!

We are thrilled to announce that Philosophy graduate student Tano S. Posteraro has been selected to receive the Harold F. Martin Graduate Assistant Outstanding Teaching Award! Congratulations Tano!

The Department of Philosophy is thrilled to announce that Dr. David Marriott will be joining our faculty in the Fall of 2019 as Liberal Arts Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies.

Dr. Marriot was born and educated in England, where he taught at the Universities of London and Sussex. His most recent publications include Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford, 2018) and Duppies (London Materials, 2017). He is also completing a new book, titled X: On the Matter of Black Life, a critical study of racial concepts of life. He will be joining us from the History of Consciousness Department, University of California, at Santa Cruz.

Welcome, Dr. Marriot!

As of this semester (fall 2018), doctoral students will be able to takes courses in World Philosophies in fulfillment of the program course requirements. This new course rubric is intended to problematize the chronology of Western philosophy. It signals the doctoral programs distinctive agenda of diversifying the Western canon. The rubric includes not only figures outside the Western canon, but also figures who have remained marginal or entirely neglected because they have not been generally considered as “philosophers.” World Philosophies courses aim to focus attention on the methodological question of how philosophy and its history is to be conceived.

The Penn State Philosophy Department no longer either requires or considers GRE scores for admission to our Ph.D. program. All admitted students will be funded through a combination of tuition waivers and a graduate assistantship. However, because the university requires GRE scores for certain university-wide fellowships (such as the University Graduate Fellowship) that come with enhanced stipends and/or other benefits, applicants who wish to be considered for such awards should submit their GRE scores. Generally, to be awarded a University Graduate Fellowship, an applicant needs to have a cumulative score around 320 and a writing score around a 5.0.