Why PS @ NYU?
The porosity and flexibility of the department enables students and professors alike to get right to the difficult work of thinking. The department encourages scholars to bypass that laborious passage through a traditional academic discipline before arriving at an object of study. Instead, we ask how we might train ourselves and our students to be better prepared and rehearsed for those objects. Cues are taken up differently here. Our department’s interpretation of erudition is one that refuses “mastery” over objects and texts, and instead asks for an indefatigable willingness to carefully read and research wherever and whatever those things take us towards. The dynamic intellectual and interpersonal generosity between faculty, staff, and students make a unique experience in a university setting where everyone-- and all that they bring-- are taken seriously as nascent philosophers, art makers, educators.