History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies

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History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies is an interdisciplinary department, we offer three majors, tailored major options, and several exciting minors, including a minor in Latin American Studies and a minor in Museum Studies. Internships at historical societies, museums, and Yellowstone are also an important part of the educational experience. Undergraduate students also have opportunities to conduct research and work directly with faculty members on topics ranging from urban coyotes to the Butte mine. The Department hosts both history and philosophy honor societies, as well as a philosophy ethics debate team. Graduate students can pursue innovative MA and PhD degrees in the history of science and technology, environmental history, and the American west.

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    A Defense of Epistemic Intuitions
    (2013-09) Zhao, Helen
    Since the very beginning, intuitions have played a crucial role in philosophical inquiry. When Socrates asks, “What is justice?” he appeals to an innate source of knowledge that inexplicably recognizes examples of justice, even those falling outside the constraints of a definition. Intuition, as this purportedly omniscient source has been deemed, appears not only to exist universally among people, but also to hold some sort of special weight in the evaluation of normative claims—i.e. what the definition of justice should be. Likewise, epistemology in the analytic tradition employs intuitions in its conceptual analysis of knowledge. However, recent work in experimental philosophy, an emerging field that impresses the necessity of empirical data, threatens to overturn the foundations of traditional philosophy by proposing the unreliability of intuitions. According to data gathered by Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich in their paper “Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions,” intuitions are not universal and subject to 1) cultural variation, 2) socioeconomic variation, 3) previous philosophical exposure, and 4) the order in which cases are presented—that is, they are dependent on situational factors. Therefore, intuitions cannot be trusted to make normative epistemic claims. However, I plan to counter Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich by referencing the transparency of intuitions, proposed by Frank Jackson in his paper “On Gettier Holdouts,” in order to reconstruct an understanding of intuition that does not threaten epistemology in the analytic tradition and, furthermore, can be reconciled with experimental philosophy. First, I will deconstruct Weinberg et al.’s argument that intuitions fail to satisfy the Normative Project—the division of epistemology dedicated to understanding how knowledge should be understood—through their discussion of how intuitions vary. Second, I will explain Jackson’s notions of transparent intuitions, representational structures, and the “intuition module.” The last sections of this paper will be dedicated to responding to Weinberg et al. and exploring the implications of experimental philosophy on the Descriptive and Normative Projects of epistemology.
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    Analogy and the Ordering of the Polis in the Republic
    (2013-09) Rusk, Gabriel
    In Plato’s the Republic the polis and intelligible world exist to reciprocally compliment each other. More simply, politics and knowledge have a necessary and reciprocal relationship for Plato. I will argue that this reciprocal relationship is epistemic and functional in nature.
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