| Collaboration, exchange, and intellectual freedom are the core of the Humanities Center's purpose. The Center is a small group of scholars, intense and driven, but also, and crucially, enthusiastic and generous. Faculty and graduate students at the Center share a commitment to philosophical questions, engaged in literature, history, and art as well as philosophy proper. Because faculty and students work in a variety of fields, a common investment in intellectual curiosity, flexibility, and open-mindedness, as well as to careful reading and demanding criticism, is essential to the coherence of the Center. The diversity of interests in the Center in turn constitutes one of its main strengths: colloquia in the Center bring together resources from diverse disciplines, and generate feedback from scholars approaching the material from a variety of backgrounds. Thus the Center functions significantly to expand the range of resource material and critical perspectives available both to its own students and faculty and to scholars from other departments who regularly attend the Center's programs. Its inherent interdisciplinarity allows the Center to serve as a crucial meeting ground for scholars from across the university's humanities departments, particularly as students and faculty of the Center develop strong ties with those in other departments working closely to their areas of interest. The essence of the Humanities Center's interdisciplinarity, the reason why it works instead of leading merely to chaos, lies in the Center's emphasis on ideas and problems. This is interdisciplinarity with a purpose: scholars at the Center are free to approach questions and problems with whatever resources or materials prove useful, enabling what we might call an intensified existential attention to the questions themselves. The Center's graduate students benefit particularly from this mode of intellectual engagement, as they are encouraged to seek out a project addressing an authentic philosophical problem, without the restriction of disciplinary conventions. The somewhat anguished soul-searching occasioned by this freedom in students' first two years develops into innovative and deeply-thought, deeply-felt projects. The Center thus fosters a great deal of independence in its graduate students, not only in their coming to their dissertation material, but also in their taking the initiative to develop working relationships with faculty in other departments and often other institutions in the course of their research. Thus, graduate projects are anchored in the Center's shared commitment to vigorous and generous critical discussion, but also draw students outward toward the orientation in the wider academic community which characterizes the Center's faculty. |
