Departmental Honors
Requirements and Steps
1. The student must be a philosophy major and have a GPA of at least 3.5 in Philosophy to begin the Honors sequence.
2. The student must write an Honors Thesis and pass an Oral Defense on the thesis.
3. The student must take one extra upper-level philosophy course. This course may be a directed readings course for which the honors thesis is written, but such a readings course is not a requirement.
4. To begin the process, the student contacts the Honors Director in the Philosophy department (Dr. Jennifer Parks). The student should already have some idea about what the honors thesis will be in, as well as with what teacher the student may want to work to write the Thesis.
5. The departmental Honors Director will assign the student an Honors Advisor to supervise the case of the student.
- The Honors Advisor can help the student select the general area in which the student wishes to work, and can propose teachers as possible thesis supervisors with whom the student will write the honors thesis. Teachers are generally selected according to the student's preference, if the teacher agrees to the supervision. The honors thesis topic will be chosen by the student and the Honors Thesis Supervisor.
- The Honors Advisor sets up an Honors Thesis Committee for the student, consisting of the Honors Thesis Supervisor, and one member from the departmental Honors committee, plus one additional faculty member.
7. At a suitable point before the end of the semester, a penultimate draft of the thesis is given to the Honors Thesis Supervisor and is also made available to the other two members of student's Honors Thesis Committee. The Honors Thesis Supervisor will make comments for possible revision. The other members of the committee may offer feedback if they wish.
8. When the honors thesis is thus completed, there will be an oral defense of the honors thesis by the student with the student's Honors Thesis Committee.
9. The Honors Thesis Committee then votes on whether the student has passed the oral defense.
10. If the student has passed the oral defense, the departmental Honors Director will complete the required paperwork for the Dean's office, and the Honors is awarded.
Frequently Asked Questions
Question 1: Must a student be a member of the Honors College in order to graduate with honors in philosophy?
Answer: No. The two programs are completely independent of each other.
Question 2: When do I need to sign up or declare that I want to graduate with honors in philosophy?
Answer: For a student graduating in the spring, it is a good idea to start the process sometime in the fall semester of one's final year in order to allow ample time to get things done. However, a student may sign up as late as the first few weeks of the spring semester.
Question 3: How do I sign up?
Answer: Stop by the office or send an e-mail to the director of the honors in philosophy program. (For academic year 05-06, the director is Dr. Heidi Malm: hmalm@luc.edu, Crown Center #355.) Tell her your name and when you expect to graduate and, to the extent possible, the areas of philosophical study you prefer and/or the area in which you'd like to write your honors thesis (e.g., ancient, metaphysics, applied ethics, phenonmenology, a particular figure). If you have an idea of the faculty members with whom you'd prefer to work, include that too. Based on what you say, Dr. Malm will assign you to a member of the honors committee who will further advise you and help with the more particular matters such as selecting a committee, choosing a topic, scheduling dates, etc.
Question 4: How long does the honors thesis need to be?
Answer: There is no set page minimum or maximum. The thesis should be a substantial paper. Depending upon the area of study, that may be 15, 25, or even 40 pages. A student's committee will help the student determine what is required in her/his chosen area of study.
Question 5: Do I need to write the thesis "from scratch"?
Answer: No. Doing so is permitted, but students often start with a paper they have written for another philosophy class and revise, expand, deepen, and/or develop it into a bigger, better paper. It is a good idea to select a paper that one feels one had a significant amount of personal philosophic input, as opposed to, say, a paper that merely summarizes the research of others. It is also a good idea to ask the professor for whom one wrote the paper to re-critique it (i.e., more than what was done to give it a grade) with the aim of helping the student develop it into an honors thesis.
Question 6: Are there deadlines for completing the thesis?
Answer: The thesis and oral defense need to be completed by the end of finals week of the student's last semester. However, if the student wants to attend the University's honors convocation and have her/his name listed in the program for that convocation, then the student needs to complete the thesis and oral defense before the publication deadline for the program, which is likely to be in the second to last week of classes.
Question 7: Do the above deadlines mean that I can submit my thesis during finals week?
Answer: No. The normal procedure is for a student to submit a penultimate draft (not a rough draft) of the thesis to the primary faculty member (or all three faculty members if they are willing) of the student's honors committee. That member(s) critiques the paper in great detail and returns it to the student for revisions. The revised version of the thesis is then given to all three members of the committee approximately one week before the scheduled oral defense of the thesis. Thus, in order to have time for reading, critiquing, revising, and re-reading the thesis, the student needs to submit the penultimate draft many weeks before the end of the semester. Different committees will be more or less flexible with the dates and timeline and will work out the particular dates with the student, but as a general rule, the student should expect to submit her/his penultimate draft in the tenth week of classes.
Question 8: What is a penultimate draft?
Answer: A penultimate draft is technically the next to last draft. It represents the best work the student can do on her/his own and is work that is ready to be critiqued by the faculty. (A student may also submit rough drafts earlier in the process if the particular faculty members are willing to read them.) The point of the critique is for faculty to help the student make the paper even better by exposing places in which arguments need to be given or strengthened, gaps filled in, or related ideas covered.
Question 9: Who decides if the honors thesis and oral defense satisfy the requirements?
Answer: That determination is made by the student's honors committee which is generally comprised of three faculty members with an interest in the student's area of study. The student's honors advisor will help the student put together her/his particular honors committee.
Question 10: How long is the oral defense?
Answer: There is no required time limit, but the process tends to last between one and two hours. Generally, the student begins by summarizing her/his thesis (this might take 10-15 minutes) and then the faculty ask the student questions about the thesis (or the research for it, or its applications) for about an hour. The student then leaves the room while the faculty decide whether the student passed. (Note: The environment for the oral defense is supportive. Students needn't worry that the faculty are trying to fail them. Faculty generally won't allow the student to proceed to the oral defense unless the faculty believe that the thesis has a high probability of passing.)
For more information about graduating with Honors in Philosophy, contact Dr. Jennifer Parks at: 773.508.2308, or e-mail: jparks1@luc.edu.
