Philosophy Hall is a building on the campus of Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. It houses the English, Philosophy, and French departments, along with the university's writing center, part of its registrar's office, and the student lounge of its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University is the branch of the university that grants academic degrees, including M.A.'s and Ph.D.'s., in fields not covered by the university's professional or other schools....

. It is one of the original buildings designed for the university's Morningside Heights campus by McKim, Mead, and White

McKim, Mead, and White

McKim, Mead & White was a prominent American architectural firm at the turn of the twentieth century and in the history of American architecture. The firm's founding partners were Charles Follen McKim , William Rutherford Mead and Stanford White...

, built in the Italian Renaissance Revival style and completed in 1910. Philosophy Hall is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and has been designated a National Historic Landmark

National Historic Landmark

A National Historic Landmark is a building, site, structure, object, or district, that is officially recognized by the United States government for its historical significance...

 as the site of the invention of FM radio by Edwin Armstrong

Edwin Armstrong

Edwin Howard Armstrong was an American electrical engineer and inventor. Armstrong was the inventor of modern frequency modulation radio....

 in the early 1930s.

The space now occupied by the registrar formerly housed electrical engineering

Electrical engineering

Electrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...

 laboratories in which Michael I. Pupin and Edwin Howard Armstrong made several major technological breakthroughs. Over the years the building has been home to such notable faculty members as philosophers John Dewey

John Dewey

John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...

, Frederick J. E. Woodbridge

Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge

Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge was a teacher at various American universities. Woodbridge considered himself a naïve realist, deeply impressed with Santayana...

 and Ernest Nagel

Ernest Nagel

Ernest Nagel was a Czech-American philosopher of science. Along with Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, and Carl Hempel, he is sometimes seen as one of the major figures of the logical positivist movement....

, Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé

Maryse Condé

Maryse Condé is a Guadeloupean, French language author of historical fiction, best known for her novel Segu . Maryse Condé was born as Maryse Boucolon at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, the youngest of eight children. In 1953, her parents sent her to study at Lycée Fénelon and Sorbonne in Paris,...

, French literary scholar Michael Riffaterre

Michael Riffaterre

Michael or Michel Riffaterre was an influential French literary critic and theorist. He pursued a generally structuralist approach. He is well known in particular for his book Semiotics of Poetry, and the concepts of hypogram and syllepsis.He was born in Bourganeuf, in the Limousin region of France...

, poet Kenneth Koch

Kenneth Koch

Kenneth Koch was an American poet, playwright, and professor, active from the 1950s until his death at age 77...

 and English literary scholars Lionel Trilling

Lionel Trilling

Lionel Trilling was an American literary critic, author, and teacher. With wife Diana Trilling, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review. Although he did not establish a school of literary criticism, he is one of the leading U.S...

, Edward Said

Edward Said

Edward Wadie Saïd was a Palestinian-American literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism...

, Carolyn Heilbrun, Quentin Anderson

Quentin Anderson

Quentin Anderson was an American literary critic and cultural historian at Columbia University. His research focused on 19th-century American authors, especially Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman, and their attempts to define American identity as both connected to and...

, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian literary critic, theorist and a University Professor at Columbia University. She is best known for the essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?", considered a founding text of postcolonialism, and for her translation of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. She...

 and Mark Van Doren

Mark Van Doren

Mark Van Doren was an American poet, writer and a critic, apart from being a scholar and a professor of English at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, where he inspired a generation of influential writers and thinkers including Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, John Berryman, and Beat Generation...

.

Philosophy Hall was not occupied by protesters during the 1968 protests

Columbia University protests of 1968

The Columbia University protests of 1968 were among the many student demonstrations that occurred around the world in that year. The Columbia protests erupted over the spring of that year after students discovered links between the university and the institutional apparatus supporting the United...

. It served instead as a refuge for faculty and a site of contentious debates among them concerning student conduct.

The lawn in front of Philosophy Hall is the site of an original cast of The Thinker

The Thinker

The Thinker is a bronze and marble sculpture by Auguste Rodin, whose first cast, of 1902, is now in the Musée Rodin in Paris; there are some twenty other original castings as well as various other versions, studies, and posthumous castings. It depicts a man in sober meditation battling with a...

(Le Penseur), one of the most famous pieces by French sculptor Auguste Rodin

Auguste Rodin

François-Auguste-René Rodin , known as Auguste Rodin , was a French sculptor. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past...

.

The hall was designated a National Historic Landmark

National Historic Landmark

A National Historic Landmark is a building, site, structure, object, or district, that is officially recognized by the United States government for its historical significance...

in 2003.

It is one of only a handful of buildings on the Columbia campus named for an academic discipline, and not an individual. The others include Mathematics, Journalism, and International Affairs.

External links

• National Historic Landmark Nomination History and description, page 4 of 21