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Every human being seeks answers to life鈥檚 most basic questions鈥攓uestions regarding the nature of knowledge, truth, rationality, language, being, transcendence, God, faith, beauty, the good, justice, humanity, friendship, love, sexuality, identity, power, authenticity, and so on. Reflection on such questions remains the core of the study of philosophy. Philosophy is faithful to the human condition itself when it maintains a living relation with these basic questions of meaning and concern: What is the good life? What is evil, and why is there suffering? What constitutes our proper relation to the truth? What are the prospects for rational reflection and shared conviction? The persistence of these questions (rather than uniformity of answers) confers on the history of philosophy its unity, even as the diversity of possible responses also provides for richness and a growing stock of intellectual resources for addressing such questions. The mission of the Philosophy Department at Boston College today, in both its teaching and scholarly research, is to provide a challenging, yet supportive environment for the exploration of these questions and answers that inform our personal, communal, and institutional lives.

We approach our mission in our teaching and scholarly research through the critical examination of multiple philosophical traditions. In our view, a contemporary philosopher cannot begin to address the same questions that her predecessors also faced except from within the field of proposals previously opened up by those predecessors. It is certain that whatever we today may achieve will in no small part be indebted to the prior achievements conveyed to us. Yet this is no more to say that good philosophy simply repeats its past than it is to say that 鈥渢he good life,鈥� 鈥渢ruth鈥� or 鈥渞ationality鈥� are today quite what they were two centuries or two millennia ago. The great figures in the history of philosophy offer us works to which we are immediately indebted, but which cannot speak to our own time and place exactly as they spoke to the time and place in which they were written. This is why a healthy relationship of philosophy to its own history requires constant sensitivity to the contexts in which questions arise and responses are worked out. Hence, philosophical reflection is not only simply historical but also, in a careful sense, hermeneutical.

This conception of philosophy, evident already in the most ancient texts of our tradition and preserved especially in what is now called the continental tradition, refuses to exclude or privilege any dimension of human experience over any of the others. Instead, it attempts to understand their true relations鈥攚hether these be of reason and passion, body and soul, or animal, human and divine. So conceived, philosophy is necessarily interdisciplinary because different disciplines attend well to different features of human reality. And philosophy is therefore also intimately in accord with the Jesuit Catholic mission of Boston College, since a positive relation to other disciplines and a positive interest in the full range of human experiences is essentially consistent with Ignatius鈥檚 suggestion that one should seek truth and goodness in all things.