The curriculum is divided into historical and topical courses as well as research seminars and cross-listed courses. The historical courses deal with an epoch or an individual thinker; the topical courses with an area (e.g. ethics or metaphysics) or an issue (e.g. immortality or potentiality). But both types of courses are, in different ways, historical and topical. The topical courses draw from the entire textual history and the historical courses engage the issues through the thinker or thinkers studied. Research seminars especially encourage writing for publication for doctoral students while cross-listed courses are typically taken with upper-level undergraduates. All courses aim to encourage philosophical reflection, to arrive at the very "first things."
A ten-week seminar concerning many of the professional skills required for success as graduate students and future professors and scholars. This course is now required of all PhD students.
5000-level courses include a mixture of undergraduate and graduate students, including some undergraduates with majors other than philosophy. In addition, some undergraduate courses are cross-listed as graduate courses, designated by the numbers from 5301 to 5310, in which the instructor provides additional requirements for the graduate participants. Only two such courses may count toward completion of PhD requirements. There is no such limit for courses numbered 5311 and higher, which include courses such as Philosophy of Law, Philosophy of History, and Philosophy of Technology—though graduate students should remember, again, that these courses may include undergraduate non-majors.
Courses offered at the 6000 level are historical in orientation. Those designated as “text seminars” are particularly helpful as guides to advanced study of the history of philosophy. Text seminars covering six historical periods (Antiquity, Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, the Later Middle Ages, Early Modernity, Later Modernity, and Postmodernity) are offered on a three-year cycle; each seminar covers one or more important works from the relevant period and prepares students for independent study of the period as a whole. Although the historical courses are not sufficient to prepare for the comprehensive exam, they are an especially important element in that preparation.
Courses at the 7000 level are topically oriented. Courses addressing the central topics of contemporary philosophical inquiry—Epistemology, Ethics, Philosophical Anthropology, Philosophy of God, Metaphysics, and the Nature of Tradition—are offered on a regular basis. Other topical courses, such as Aesthetics, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Science, are offered from time to time; many of these courses are offered at other times as cross-listed undergraduate courses (see the discussion of 5000-level courses above). The 7000-level courses are also an important element in the preparation for comprehensive exams.
These seminars are usually limited to doctoral students, and they reflect current faculty research interests. They are offered at the 8000 level. Although all graduate courses aim to prepare the student to engage in independent scholarship, these courses especially encourage writing for publication.
Chair and Associate Professor of English Debra Romanick Baldwin, Ph.D., and Professor of Physics and recent Interim Dean of Constantin College Sally Hicks, Ph.D., have secured a $299,078 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support writing instruction at UD for the fall 2020 semester.
+ Read MoreHis first step was to enroll in physician’s assistant school at Baylor’s College of Medicine, a career trajectory to which he had aspired since his early childhood. Nowadays, Jonathan Cunningham, BA ’17, is dedicated to the vocational pursuit of comfort and healing at MD Anderson in Houston, among the largest cancer treatment centers in the U.S., where he was once a chemotherapy patient himself.
+ Read MoreDuring his Rome semester in 1991, Joseph Meaney, BA '93, with his friends (now Father) Kevin Cook, BA '94, and (now Texas State Representative and UD Trustee) Tan Parker, BA '93, attended a private Mass with Pope St. John Paul II. Several weeks earlier, they had hand-delivered a letter to the Swiss Guards outside St. Peter's requesting the Mass and including their contact information; at last, they'd received the phone call instructing them to be at the Bronze Gates at 5 a.m.
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