About

Phillips Academy is now a non-denominational private secondary school. For over twenty years this department has been separate in principle from the chaplaincy. What was once the department of Religion became the department of Religion and Philosophy and is now designated as the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies.

Our instructors are chosen for their abilities to promote the programmatic goals of the department in a school that deliberately brings together students from a wide variety of backgrounds. We seek to reap a rich harvest of learning from that diversity in order to prepare our students for a world that will challenge them to understand and work fruitfully together with people of many backgrounds, habits and beliefs.

The Curriculum

Three and four year students may choose any grade-appropriate course the department offers at any time in their academic career to meet our graduation requirement. It should be noted that the current program for juniors leaves no room for them to take philosophy and religious studies. There are no pre-requisites for any of our courses. However, they are numbered according to grade-appropriate texts and instruction. 300 level courses are open to 10th, 11th and 12th graders. They include introductions to various religious traditions and sacred texts, to ethical reflection in the western philosophical tradition, and to applied logic. 400 level courses are open to 11th and 12th graders and to 10th graders only with the permission of the instructor. These courses tend to be issue and topic oriented. The intellectual challenge for students is increased as they apply a variety of religious and philosophical points of view to historical events like the Holocaust and to difficult dilemmas that surface in the contexts of civil rights, medicine and the environment. 500 level courses are open only to 11th and 12th graders. These advanced courses are comparable in sophistication to introductory courses offered to first and second year college students, and they may involve more than nine hours of work per week. Our offerings reflect the interests and abilities of our students, our training as scholars, and our sense of what is appropriate for achieving our department goals in this educational context.