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Catherine (Cathy) Kemp,
Class of 1987
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| My Earlham
education remains the best part of my preparation for work in philosophy.
After graduating I entered the PhD program at SUNY Stony Brook. As
I was finishing my dissertation on David Hume’s theory of belief, I decided
to go to law school and so spent the next three years at the University
of Texas School of Law. I knew I still wanted to teach, but had to
decide whether I wanted to work at a law school or on a philosophy faculty.
In the end I sought a job in philosophy and taught for seven years at the
University of Colorado at Denver in a small, energetic department committed
to teaching the history of philosophy and getting undergraduate students
excited about studying philosophy that way. After receiving tenure in Denver, I spent four years at Penn State, leaving to follow my husband, Mitchell Aboulafia, to his job as the chair of the liberal arts division at the Juilliard School in New York city. In Fall 2007 I join the faculty at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York as an associate professor. All through my years after Earlham I carried the college’s social and educational commitments into my graduate studies and my teaching. In the philosophy major the intensity of reading that characterizes Earlham’s general curriculum was even more concentrated and, along with the rigor of Earlham’s philosophy classes, gave me a better preparation than most of my fellow students in graduate school. You can never read enough in the history of philosophy! The challenge is to carry the same skills into the 20th (and now the 21st!) century with all of its philosophical diversity. |
Hometown:
Houston, Texas Philosophy courses at Earlham: Western Ways of Wisdom, Ancient Greek, Rationalism and Empiricism, Kant, 19th Century, Contemporary Epistemology, Contemporary Ethics, Plato and Thucydides, Skepticism, Philosophy and Literature, American Philosophy, Metaphilosophy, and Symbolic Logic. Current Position: Associate Professor of philosophy at Brooklyn College/CUNY. |
| E-mail Cathy at cek13@psu.edu. |
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Sina Kramer, Class of 2002
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Does anyone intend to begin studying philosophy? I too stumbled into a
philosophy course in my first semester at Earlham, and I was never without
it for very long afterwards. I am now pursuing a PhD. in Philosophy at DePaul
University, in an environment that reminds me very much of my time at Earlham.
I entered graduate school well prepared for serious textual work and with
a strong understanding of the history of philosophy, largely because of the
strength of my education at Earlham in general, and in the philosophy program
in particular. I am grateful and often, looking back, surprised at the high
level of expectations we were held to in our work, and the amount we were
able to achieve with the careful guidance and support of our instructors
and friends. Philosophy at Earlham is studied with a rigor and an honesty
and with a sort of collective camaraderie; I can still say that there is
nothing like struggling through a difficult text, like Kant’s Critique
of
Pure Reason or Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, collectively with a group
of committed and terribly bright individuals, under the guidance of a talented
and engaging teacher. All of the courses I took in philosophy were taught
with unabashed rigor, intensity and humor, and the instructors gave to their
students a certain freedom to discover the text and its challenges on their
own, and to grapple with them in a personal way. Studying philosophy prepared
me well for the work of living, but imparted to my mind a restlessness that
a nine-to-five job could not satisfy; I hope someday to find myself in the
business of passing on a love for this work. |
Hometown: Bloomington,
Indiana Philosophy courses at Earlham: Rationalism and Empiricism, Symbolic Logic, Ancient Greek Philosophy, Kant, 19th Century Philosophy, 20th Century Philosophy, Ethics of Justice and Care, Seminar: Kant’s 2nd and 3rd Critiques, Seminar: Contemporary Interpretations of Plato, Independent Study on Kant’s First Critique, Teaching Assistant for Kant and for Existentialism in Literature. Current Position: Graduate Student in Philosophy at DePaul University, Chicago. |
| E-mail Sina at skramer1@students.depaul.edu |
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