B.A. Philosophy (Hons.)

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.