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Philosophy is one of the smaller departments at St
Stephen’s. Rather than the traditional lecture classes are organized
more along the lines of interactive group discussions. We have
currently widened our base to offer an exciting range of concurrent
courses. We seek to maintain a friendly and somewhat informal
classroom atmosphere. The first year introduces you to the elements
of formal reasoning, an essential tool to help you to decipher and
unravel some of the complex arguments that you will have to analyse
over the next three years. You also study important philosophical
strands in classical Indian philosophy, including the ‘Vedic’ and
the ‘non-Vedic’ schools. The second year invites you to think along
with some western philosophers, including Socrates, Plato and
Aristotle and, with a leap through the centuries, Descartes,
Leibnitz, Berkeley, Hume and Kant. The third year offers you a wide
range of elective subjects from the philosophy of language to
philosophy of religion. The two compulsory papers here are on ethics
and two major texts of Indian philosophy.
Given that philosophy is not taught at the high
school level, it is not surprising that students applying to study
philosophy often wonder ‘what it is all about’. We would like to
believe that nothing is excluded from philosophy and during your
time at St Stephen’s you will indeed have opportunities for
discussing practically every topic under the sun. However, please do
not confuse philosophy with topics such as magic, astrology,
numerology, and the like.
So what is philosophy? Very briefly, it is an
invitation to think. We believe that we can provide an environment
where you can learn to think boldly. Our weekly meetings in the
philosophical society are an additional forum where students and
faculty present papers for discussion on a variety of issues.
The Faculty:
Dr Vijay Tankha (Logic, Greek Philosophy, Ethics)
Dr K.P. Shankaran (Indian philosophy; Kant;
Philosophy of Language)
Mr R.S. Nanda (Logic; Locke, Berkeley, Hume;
Aesthetics)
Dr Ankur Barua (Logic; Descartes, Leibnitz, Spinoza;
Indian philosophy;)
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