Valuing persons, seeking truth and the common good
Promoting the cause of men and women for others
Canisius College — a modern American Catholic Jesuit University — is committed to promoting academic excellence, to earnestly discovering and communicating truth, and to educating leaders with moral integrity and a sense of community responsibility. This commitment is expressed in the Canisius College Mission Statement —
Canisius College espouses the ideal of academic excellence along with a sense of responsibility to use one’s gifts for the service of others and the benefit of society. It seeks to promote the intellectual and ethical life of its students, helping to prepare them for productive careers as well as for meaningful personal lives and positive contributions to human progress. Its curricular and co-curricular programs are designed to educate the whole person through development of intellectual, moral, spiritual and social qualities. It aims to promote the contemporary Jesuit mission of the service of faith and the promotion of justice.
Jesuit education today has decidedly put greater emphasis than ever before on the teaching of social justice to address the interests of those least advantaged in society. The careful study of philosophy continues to have central importance in this shift of emphasis. The Canisius College community believes that commitment to social justice cannot endure if it is not established on a clear understanding of the meanings of justice, on making the case for justice, examining competing theories of justice, and exploring the role of justice in systems of social cooperation — our recently adopted Core Curriculum affirms this commitment. From its original inspiration, philosophy has been dedicated to consider these issues, and it has always regarded them as intimately connected to the larger, fundamental questions about the nature of knowledge and reason, truth and reality, human nature and dignity, morality, and other important aspects of the human condition. The faculty of the Department of Philosophy at Canisius College is committed to address these concerns by infusing its curriculum with the Ignatian spirit of inquiring after truth.
Philosophy instruction and philosophical research at Canisius College seek to retain and to promote what is best in its Western, Catholic, and Jesuit heritage in order to speak to contemporary problems and to explore innovative ways to effect justice. We are convinced that we can learn from the traditional philosophical canon itself how best to advance or transform it in ways to realize the ideals of peace and justice. Thus one finds in the Department of Philosophy research and teaching that centers on issues of justice, on gender and society, and that considers whether the values of humanism need to be broadened to include animals and environments. We encourage dialogue between Western and non-Western thinking in order to broaden the arena for examining and then finding enduring solutions to the moral and social problems facing all peoples in the modern world.
The philosophy faculty at Canisius College invite you join our community of caring persons on a spirited journey seeking knowledge and understanding. We embrace the importance of philosophy for the betterment of humanity and we are committed to the principle that philosophy become available to everyone. We invite you to become part of this adventure to explore what is inescapably human, to make wonderful discoveries about life, community, nature, and the world … to become more fully human by adopting the maxim that “the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being”.
Philosophical Beginnings