BA in Philosophy
Majors in philosophy engage with philosophical problems, thinkers, techniques, and methodologies drawn from the whole of its history and from all its principal sub-fields. Majoring in philosophy provides a strong basis for numerous career paths and a solid liberal arts foundation for any student.
Program Requirements and Policies
- Ten courses are required for the BA in Philosophy. Each course is typically 3 credits.
- Every course for the major must be taken for a grade: no P/Fs
- Students planning to undertake graduate work in philosophy are urged also to (1) write a senior honors thesis in Philosophy and/or (2) petition to take PHIL 0297-01 Graduate Writing Seminar. (These courses do not count toward the philosophy major).
- Students may count no more than five courses numbered below 100 for the major. At least seven courses constituting a Philosophy major must be offered or cross-listed by the Tufts Philosophy Department.
- Students may double major in Philosophy and another field as long as they use no more than five courses to count for both majors. (Other majors may have more restrictive requirements; please consult their websites as well as the Tufts Bulletin for more information.) As a rule, the Arts and Sciences faculty urges students to design their programs with minimal course overlap between majors.
Course Requirements
Ten courses, five of which must be upper level, including:
- PHIL 0002
- At least one course in Logic:
- PHIL 0033 Logic or
- PHIL 0103 Logic or
- PHIL 0114 Topics in Logic
- PHIL 0170 Computation Theory
- Or another 100-level logic course
- At least one course numbered 100 or above in each of the following areas:
- History (ancient through early 20th-century, including phenomenology and early analytic philosophy). Courses that meet this requirement include:
- PHIL 0150 Plato's Socrates
- PHIL 0151 Ancient Philosophy
- PHIL 0152 History of Modern Philosophy
- PHIL 0155 Twentieth-Century American and British Philosophy
- PHIL 0157 The History of Analytic Philosophy
- PHIL 0161 Empiricism
- PHIL 0163 Rationalism
- PHIL 0164 Kant
- PHIL 0167 Science Before Newton's Principia
- PHIL 0168 Newton's Principia
- PHIL 0185 From Hegel to Nietzsche
- PHIL 0186 Phenomenology and Existentialism
- PHIL 0187 Seminars in the History of Philosophy
- PHIL 0188 Seminars in the History of Philosophy
- Value Theory (including moral philosophy, social and political philosophy, and aesthetics)
- PHIL 0121 Ethical Theory
- PHIL 0123 Philosophy of Law
- PHIL 0124 Bioethics
- PHIL 0125 Racism and Social Inequality
- PHIL 0128 Human Rights: History and Theory
- PHIL 0129 Meta-ethics
- PHIL 0130 Moral Psychology
- PHIL 0140 Liberalism and Its Philosophical Critics
- PHIL 0141 Global Justice
- PHIL 0143 Philosophy and Public Policy
- PHIL 0197 Seminar: Ethics, Law & Society
- Metaphysics and Epistemology (including philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science). Courses that meet this requirement include:
- PHIL 0110 Biological Foundations of Language
- PHIL 0111 Semantics
- PHIL 0112 Syntactic Theory
- PHIL 0113 Cognition of Society and Culture
- PHIL 0116 Philosophy of Science
- PHIL 0117 Philosophy of Mind
- PHIL 0118 Philosophy of Biology
- PHIL 0120 Metaphysics
- PHIL 0131 Epistemology
- PHIL 0133 Philosophy of Language
- PHIL 0134 Philosophy of Social Science
- History (ancient through early 20th-century, including phenomenology and early analytic philosophy). Courses that meet this requirement include:
- One 100-level seminar (which can also count for any of the above requirements and which must be drawn from among Phil 187, 188, 191, 192, 197 or, under appropriate circumstances, 195, 291, or 292), or the Majors Seminar (PHIL 77).