Department of Philosophy is one of the departments of faculty of Arts of the Indira Gandhi College, Boitamari. The Department of Philosophy established in the year 1995 (formally introduced in the year 2009) with an aim to develop learners critical thinking skills as the study of philosophy forces you to think outside your normal thought process.  Philosophy is a discipline with long-standing tradition. However, in the same vein of love, it is not easy to unearth what philosophy is. The word philosophy comes from two Greek words, philos, which means friend or lover, and sophia, which means wisdom. Thus, the literal meaning of philosophy is the love for a high degree of knowledge and, more importantly, the philosopher is the friend or, better, lover of knowledge. If we look back, for early Greek thinkers, philosophy, wisdom or excellence meant the totality of knowledge, i.e. knowledge in all the sciences as well as all the social sciences as we know them in our day, i.e. physics, chemistry, biology, geography, history, economics, sociology etc. all disciplines were seen and understood from philosophical point of view and so philosophy was referred to as the mother of all disciplines.

Students who learn philosophy get a great many benefits from doing so. The tools taught by philosophy are of great use in further education and in employment too. Philosophy is a basic field of inquiry.  It makes a central contribution to the educational enterprise through its demands upon intellectual activity. It is the systematic study of ideas and issues, a reasoned pursuit of fundamental truths, a quest for a holistic/comprehensive understanding of the world, and our place within it. Barring philosophical skills and sophistications, the study of philosophy can develop intellectual abilities that are readily applicable to pursuits in other academic fields, useful in careers and valuable in everyday social and personal life. In other words, what is learned in philosophy can be applied in virtually any endeavour because the study of philosophy improves one’s problem-solving capacities, communication skills, persuasive powers, writing skills, evaluative skills and so on. Apart from these, the study of philosophy helps us to distinguish fine and subtle differences between views and to discover common ground between opposing positions. In a sense, the study of philosophy encourages us to synthesize a variety of views into one unified whole. Moreover, philosophy is indispensable in assessing the various standards of evidence used by other disciplines as all fields of knowledge employ reasoning and set of standards of evidence; logic and epistemology have a general bearing on all these fields.

The department of philosophy offers UG course (Major and Minor) and around 90 undergraduate students are taught by the department. Our graduate program produces with comprehensive knowledge in different branches of the subject. A wide range of courses in different branches of philosophy like Indian philosophy (classical and contemporary), Western Epistemology and Metaphysics, Analytic philosophy, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Science, Logic (Indian and Western), Ethics/Moral philosophy, Applied Ethics, Environmental ethics/ philosophy, Analytic Ethics, Philosophy of religion and comparative Religion, Social and political philosophy, Philosophy of Human Rights, Existentialism and phenomenology, Philosophy of Gandhi, Philosophy of Sankaradeva, Philosophy of Value, Philosophy of Culture, Philosophy of Education, Philosophy of Mind are being offered by the department.