The Doctoral Philosophy Program offers courses that emphasize Continental Philosophy and the History of Philosophy. Our strengths in Continental Philosophy range from its beginnings in Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, through the classic texts of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty, up to the contemporary treatments of hermeneutics, deconstruction, genealogy, literary, critical, cultural, and feminist theories found in writers like Gadamer, Ricoeur, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, Habermas, Baudrillard, and Irigaray.

The Department's emphasis on the History of Philosophy is especially strong in the program’s focus on Ancient Greek Philosophy, as well as in the course offerings in medieval philosophy, primarily Augustine and Aquinas, and early modern philosophy. The department also has specialists in William James, John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, and Alain Locke to allow students to explore the correlations between American philosophy and Contemporary Continental thought.

More specifically, the doctoral program at Villanova leads students to ask questions about the relation between modernity and post-modernity, the very idea of a tradition, the possible relation between art and truth, the varieties of feminist theories, classical ethical and political issues, and the character of religion in the postmodern situation.