By Michael A. Deere Philosophy Department I often joke with my students that the discipline of philosophy is perhaps the only one in which a living is made off of not knowing the answers to the questions that we pose.  Philosophers excel at not knowing.  One need only mark Socrates on this score: The wisdom [...]

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By Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello Department of Interdisciplinary Studies “The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.” —Albert Einstein “To be liberally educated is to be transformed.” –From statement on “Why Study the [...]

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By Jim Gubbins Department of Interdisciplinary Studies “What is a good life?” Isn’t that a big, wonderful question? Isn’t that the question we should all be asking ourselves? I strongly suspect that unless we have wandered into a philosophy class, we are not asking that question, nor will we find that question dominating the Blogosphere, [...]

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By Michael Mulnix Philosophy Department Michael Mulnix One commonly held belief in the study of ethics takes moral claims to be somehow dependent upon social and individual circumstance, wherein the moral status of an action is a function of the environment in which it is carried out. The position of ‘moral particularism,’ however, uses this [...]

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By Rod Kessler English Department Of all the journals and periodicals in the world, it would surprise anyone who knows me well that I might take inspiration from Parade, that glossy insert to the Boston Globe whose celebrity news column typically raises such pertinent questions as which film star has the best abs (Mario Lopez) [...]

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By Paul Kelly Biology Department “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.” – Bertrand Russell The well-publicized battles between evolutionary theory and the religious beliefs of some fundamentalists are just the latest in a series of struggles against [...]

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On March 17, Communications professors Robert Brown and Mark Zaitchik met at the invitation of the Salem State chapter of Lambda Pi Eta, the Communications Honor Society, to discuss the very heart of their department’s business-the business of communications. Professor Brown brings the insights of a practitioner to the classroom. He has worked for a [...]

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