Banner for SOU’s 2025 campus theme
On Wednesday May 28th, after most of campus had gone home, Southern Oregon University Philosopher Chair Dr. Prakesh Chenjeri, the lone professor in his Department, took a shot at solving the mysteries of reality.
“This room is a braintrust,” said Dr. Chenjeri, “in the real sense of the word,” and the Meese Auditorium stuffed to the gills with decorated faculty, engaged students, and University President Rick Bailey. Dr. Chenjeri, who specializes in the philosophical implications of scientific literacy and democracy, interrogated presentations by faculty and students. The purpose of campus themes is to “ponder the big questions”.
The theme was the nature of reality, decided long in advance, and presenters and Dr. Chenjeri spent most of the year zeroing in on that Wednesday. Dr. Chenjeri examined the four presentations from three different angles, the “Big Three” of philosophy– the Epistemological, Metaphysical, and Ethical. The Epistemological grapples with questions of what is knowable to begin with, and how it can be known, while the Metaphysical aims to examine the nature of existence itself, and the Ethical line of questioning focuses on moral implications.
The presentations, created by Dr. Bridgitte O’Brien, Dr. Fred Grewe, Dr. Mark Tveskov, and students Sebastian Cantero, Cody Castillo, and Scott-Barrere examined reality from a variety of perspectives, including archaeological, religious, and ecological ways of looking at the world. O’Brien’s presentation, for instance, highlighted the “ecological responsibilities and,” importantly– “transgressions” inherent in modern society’s conceptions of reality. Tveskov’s presentation, meanwhile, was a thoughtful and widely praised overview of work he has done around Maxville, a settlement of predominantly African-American loggers in eastern Oregon, which brought up questions about “who the story belongs to”, and whether archaeology as a fact finding process is mere exploration or a lengthy dialogue with both the past and the present.
Dr. Chenjeri said the burden of philosophers is they have to ask questions about things other actors take for granted. Dr. Chenjeri, for instance, spent much of his own presentation questioning the underlying assumptions made by the presenters, such as wondering how any actual thorough examination or interrogation of reality can grapple with the anthropocentrism inherent in any human attempt to understand the world, as well as grappling with more classic and familiar philosophical questions like whether we can even know if the universe is real (the denial of this is called “solipsism”, the theory that the self is all that exists).
Dr. Chenjeri made it clear to the audience that the questioning exercise of philosophy never ends. In fact, we concluded the evening with just as many unanswered questions as we entered it with. Which perhaps comes from a flawed understanding of philosophy, as a mere fact-finding process, rather than an exploration of something vastly bigger than us where endless discovery can only be met with an endless number of new things to discover.
The campus theme for 2026 will be announced sometime in the near future, on SOU’s page.
