GE Requirement

Only CMC courses numbered 59 and below fulfill the College’s general education requirement in philosophy. These are the GE courses:

  • PHIL 030 CM - Philosophical Questions (similar to Intro to Philosophy)
  • PHIL 032 CM – Philosophy and the Arts
  • PHIL 033 CM - Political Philosophy
  • PHIL 034 CM - Moral and Political Issues
  • PHIL 036 CM - Philosophy of Religion
  • PHIL 037 CM – Happiness, Meaning, and Morality
  • PHIL 038 CM - Reason and Reality
  • PHIL 039 CM – Special Topics in Introductory Philosophy

Like other departments, we have considered carefully which courses are and are not appropriate for a GE. If you wish to receive GE credit for a course not on the list above, there are two possibilities, both requiring approval from the chair. Please read and follow these directions carefully:

  1. With the approval of the department chair, students who take a Freshman Humanities Seminar (FHS 010 CM) taught by a member of the CMC Department of Philosophy (including visiting professors within the Department of Philosophy) may satisfy the general education requirement in philosophy with any CMC philosophy other than PHIL 095 CM - Fundamentals of Logic or PHIL 198 CM -Senior Seminar in Philosophy. For approval, please let the chair know by email or in office hours who taught your FHS and which CMC philosophy course you wish to count.
  2. When deciding whether courses taken at other institutions may count toward the philosophy GE requirement, the chair applies the following guidelines: The course must be taught by a member of a philosophy department (not another department, such as religious studies, politics, history, etc.) and offered through a philosophy department. It must be similar to one of the CMC GE courses listed above, and not more similar to some other CMC course which does not count for Philosophy GE credit (e.g. no Philosophy of Law course can count for this reason). If you wish to petition under this rule, please provide the chair by email or at office hours with a course description, a link to the course description on the web, the department offering the course, the professor teaching the course and which department(s) they belong to, and an explanation of which course on the CMC list above you think is similar. Please note that quarter-length courses at other institutions rarely count toward the CMC philosophy GE requirement, though students seeking an exception may submit an explanation of why a quarter-length course should be treated as equivalent to a semester-length course at CMC.