The Faculty of Philosophy sees itself as an academic teaching and research institution that reflects new orientations in the humanities and cultural studies within the framework of the reform university of Erfurt and tests and profiles these new approaches in teaching and research in its own way. The starting point is the insight into the manifold tensions between cultural, i.e., perspective-based world interpretations bound to historical spaces and universally applied, and the symbolic and material orders of their practice (ways of life, religious practices, [self] representations, literature and other representational practices, forms of knowledge, etc.). Interculturality requires and enables dialogical forms of exchange and mediation on the basis of scientifically reflected comparison.
The guiding principle is the firm belief that an adequate understanding of present and future developments can only be achieved if cultures are empirically investigated
and these material investigations are scientifically reflected.
A special interest is directed at the media, especially the linguistic, but also the visual media and the new electronic media, and their historical change. This interest is connected with a fundamental reflection on the performances and materialities of the medium of language. This reflection is shaped differently in the various disciplines represented at the faculty in relation to their traditions and their specifically introduced forms of knowledge: from a systematic perspective, from the perspective of cultural and historical differentiation, from the perspective of content as well as from the perspective of the respective logics of representations and media themselves. The goal of the research as well as of the related courses of study and fields of study is the sustainability of the graduates as well as of society as a whole. Fundamental to this is the awareness of the exemplariness, historicity, and perspective-boundness of both the body of knowledge and the concepts and methods of its scientific treatment.
In order to achieve this goal, the Faculty of Humanities encompasses a spectrum of subjects,
University of Erfurt (Campus)
Nordhäuser Str. 63
99089 Erfurt