Allow me to tell you a little about the Philosophy Club at NC State. The club has been active for at least a quarter century and is almost entirely student run. I have served as the club’s faculty advisor since 2013, but my role is minimal. I make sure the club maintains continuity from year to year and is properly registered with the university; and I manage the club’s bank account. But that’s about it.
The club typically elects its officers for the upcoming year at the end of the spring semester. Failing that, I recruit someone to serve as president in the fall and ask them to assemble their leadership team. (The club’s constitution empowers me to appoint these students as officers.) The club has a president, vice-president, secretary, treasurer, a student council representative, and sometimes a social media manager.
In consultation with other members of the club, the president decides when the club will meet and what the meetings will involve. This varies from year to year, but the club typically meets 1-2 times per month from August through April, usually in a reserved meeting room either in the library or in the building that houses our department. Attendance averages around 8-10 students. In some years students have presented their own research (e.g., their honors thesis) to the club, though a typical meeting would involve a free-form discussion of some philosophical topic chosen by the president. In preparation for the meeting, the president will usually circulate some combination of videos and articles on the topic for club members to study. The meetings usually last around two hours and often include pizza. Over the years the topics have run the gamut, including modal logic, free will, postmodernism, and various historical philosophers.
The club occasionally hosts a speaker either from our faculty or from another university. For instance, a few years back the club arranged a talk by Mylan Engel (Northern Illinois University) with the title Fishy Reasoning and the Ethics of Eating. I would definitely like to see the club do more of this sort of thing in the future.
For many years, the club also co-sponsored an annual bowling competition with our Academic Study of Religion club, with the department’s ceremonial bowling pin up for grabs. Unfortunately, that club is currently in abeyance and so the bowling competition is too. Hopefully it will return in the not-too-distant future.
The philosophy club is a great way for students, mostly philosophy majors but a healthy dose of students from other majors who simply have an interest in the subject, to discuss ideas that interest them with similarly oriented students outside of the more rigid framework of a class. Their activities not only benefit the members but also enrich the life of our department.
Stephen Puryear
Stephen Puryear is Associate Professor of Philosophy and affiliate of the Classical Studies Program at North Carolina State University. Before arriving in Raleigh in 2008, he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh (2006) and spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. When not advising the philosophy club, he works on metaphysics, ethics, and the history of modern philosophy. He also serves as president of the North Carolina Philosophical Society (2019-2021).
