Philosophy Hall

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Rodin's The Thinker with Philosophy Hall in the background

Philosophy Hall is the home of the English, Philosophy, and French departments at Columbia University in New York City, along with the university's writing center, part of its registrar's office, and the student lounge of its Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. It is one of the original buildings designed for the university's Morningside Heights campus by McKim, Mead, and 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 as the site of the invention of FM radio by Edwin Armstrong in the early 1930s.

The space now occupied by the registrar formerly housed electrical engineering 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, Frederick J. E. Woodbridge and Ernest Nagel, Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé, French literary scholar Michael Riffaterre, poet Kenneth Koch and English literary scholars Lionel Trilling, Edward Said, Carolyn Heilbrun, Quentin Anderson, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Mark Van Doren.

Philosophy Hall was one of the few Columbia classroom buildings unoccupied by protesters during the 1968 protests. 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 (Le Penseur), one of the most famous pieces by French sculptor Auguste Rodin.