Villanova University offers a doctoral program in Philosophy specializing in Continental Philosophy and the History of Philosophy. Qualified students are eligible for six years of guaranteed funding, with financial awards (including tuition remission and a stipend) for the first four years and the guaranteed teaching of two courses per semester in years five and six, with compensation at the Ph.D. adjunct faculty rate. In addition to its regular awards, the University also awards one special assistantship each year to a student who has an interdisciplinary interest in the intersections of philosophy and theology.
Graduate students have the opportunity to study at other area graduate programs through affiliation with the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium. Students with assistantships participate in a highly-touted teacher training program.
The Doctoral Philosophy Program offers courses that emphasize Continental Philosophy and the History of Philosophy. Our strengths in Continental Philosophy range from its beginnings in Kant, Hegel, Schelling, and Nietzsche, through the classic texts of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer and Ricoeur, up to the contemporary treatments of hermeneutics, deconstruction, genealogy, literary, critical, cultural, and feminist theories found in writers like Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Habermas, Adorno, Baudrillard, Badiou, Agamben, Nancy, Rancière, Kristeva and Irigaray.
The Department's emphasis on the History of Philosophy is especially strong in Western thought and we have specialists in ancient Greek philosophy, as well as medieval and modern philosophy. Students have the opportunity to study environmental philosophy, enabling them to explore intersections between Continental philosophy, the History of Philosophy, and questions regarding constructions of nature, animality, and contemporary environmental exigencies. Students in our program can also develop a competence in bioethics.
More specifically, the doctoral program at Villanova leads students to ask questions about the relation between modernity and post-modernity, the very idea of a tradition, the possible relation between art and truth, the varieties of feminist theories, classical and contemporary political theory, humanism and post-humanism in the more-than-human world, and the character of religion in the postmodern situation.
