Omschrijving |
This course will address various developments in European philosophy in the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. We will begin with Kant’s Copernican turn: the idea that the fundamental philosophical problem is not to access reality as it is independent of our own minds, but to make sense of the fact that the world, insofar as it can show up to us at all, is only intelligible in the form conferred on it by our minds. (Or, as later thinkers thought of it, as mediated by our own subjectivity, in all of its sociohistorical contingency.) This approach heralded a new prominence given in European philosophy to an array of themes -- the relationship between the individual and society, the contingency of our concepts, the (im)possibility of drawing a boundary between thought and reality, and moral responsibility under immoral regimes -- giving form to new methods including phenomenology, existentialism, ideology and genealogy critique, and the dissolution of philosophical pseudo-problems. We will discuss some of the pivotal steps in this itinerary, drawing from some of the following (subject to final syllabus): Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Beauvoir, Arendt, Horkheimer and Adorno, Foucault. |