Graduate education in the Penn State Department of Philosophy coordinates our longstanding strength in Continental philosophy with our emerging specialties in feminist philosophy and critical philosophy of race. The graduate program's signature style of pursuing these strengths involves engagement with and reflection on the history of philosophy. It also integrates our strengths with the study of ethics richly informed by a historical approach. We understand Continental philosophy, feminist philosophy, and critical philosophy of race necessarily draw from multiple traditions, including analytic and American as well as Continental philosophy. Likewise, the field of ethics draws on multiple traditions, and the history of philosophy can be and is pursued by means of different problematics and diverse philosophical traditions. Graduate students are trained in multiple traditions, helping produce a new generation of diverse students who are philosophically "multilingual."
Interdisciplinary study is also possible across the humanities, the social sciences, the arts, the natural sciences, and interdisciplinary programs such as Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and African American Studies. Doctoral minors are available in social thought and in literary theory, criticism, and aesthetics. Study abroad is possible as well, through exchange programs or individual arrangements with leading departments of philosophy.