Michigan State University | College of Arts and Letters

Engaged in the Contemporary World

We offer a distinctive balance of work in the traditional areas of philosophy with research and teaching in the more directly practical areas of bioethics, environmental philosophy and ethics, and social and political thought.

Faculty are producing important scholarship in traditional philosophical sub-disciplines. At the same time, we have established areas of concentration focusing on more immediate and practical concerns. In conjunction with scholars in MSU's medical schools and environmental and agricultural science programs, the department has achieved national distinction in ethical and theoretical debates about issues pertaining to health care, food and the environment. These efforts overlap with research and teaching on race and gender issues, democratic theory, ethics and development, and critical social theory. With our commitment to this combination of problems, we are a distinctive program with a purposeful and diverse graduate student body.

The graduate program supports interdisciplinary work in such programs as Environmental Science and Policy; Gender, Justice, and Environmental Change; African American and African Studies; Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Behavior; Cognitive Science; and Women, Gender, and Social Justice. The global dimension of the department is illustrated by its Ethics and Development graduate specialization. The faculty has been ranked among the most productive in the nation and our graduate students hail from around the world.

Faculty books and other publications

Holding and Letting Go:
The Social Practice of Personal Identities
Hilde Lindemann, January, 2014, Oxford University Press

Emily Katz, "An Absurd Accumulation: Metaphysics M.2 1076b11-36," forthcoming in the summer 2014 issue of Phronesis.