The Philosophy Department's teaching scholarship, and outreach programs promote a critical understanding of the responsibilities of citizens to participate in self-governance. The Department is committed to the goal of equitable access to education as a means to enhance social progress. The scholarship of its faculty, in such areas as biomedicine, science, natural resources, and the environment, presents social criticism of models of economic growth that distribute goods in an inequitable manner, or that neglect the needs of future generations, or are environmentally destructive.
The Department's emphasis on engaged philosophy offers alternatives to the ways we currently understand ourselves and our relation to nature in our technologically complex global economy. For example, the Spring Creek Project focuses on the links between environmental philosophy, literature, and culture. The Hundere Endowed Chair of Religon and Culture initiates and sponsors numerous programs that provide alternative understandings of historical and contemporary religious and spiritual policymakers and leaders in resource management, on the impact of economic growth, and traditons of social progress on the environment. The Department's annual IDEAS MATTER Public Lecture Series, now in its 15th year, provides an ongoing forum for the discussion of citizenship in the new century.