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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
The Role of Speech and Writing in Philosophy Spring 2009. Three credits. Dmitri Nikulin Philosophy originates in and is practiced as a live conversation concerning various topics. Yet, it always involves producing written texts and often construes itself as an ongoing interpretation and discussion of the extant texts from its own tradition. In this seminar, we will discuss various attempts at realizing and establishing a relation between oral speech and writing in the philosophy and philosophizing in the works of Hesiod, Plato, Milman Parry, A. B. Lord, E. A. Havelock, W. J. Ong, R. Rorty, J. Derrida, and H. White.
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3.00 Credits
The Experience of Speech in Literature and Psychoanalysis: Marcel Proust Fall 2008-Spring 2009. Three credits. Julia Kristeva By reading In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past) in light of the Proustian experience of France's literary but also political history, and with regard to Freud's work on sublimation (compare the instructor's 2005-2006course: On Sublimation), this seminar raises the question: "Is literature as an experience still possible today "
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3.00 Credits
Nietzsche on Morality Fall 2008. Three credits. Christoph Menke In the course we will examine in detail Nietzsche's writings on morality and focus on three questions: (1) the critical interpretation of the emergence and the consequences of the modern idea of equality; (2) the systematic connections between Nietzsche's critique of morality and his critique of metaphysics (i.e., of the concept of the subject, of action, of the will, etc.); (3) the methodology of Nietzsche's interpretation, especially his conception of 'genealogy.' Ithis context, we will also refer to interpretations of Nietzsche's concept of genealogy developed by, among others, Foucault, Geuss, MacIntyre, Scheler, Williams.
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3.00 Credits
The Democratic Public and Its Aesthetic Fall 2008. Three credits. Juliane Rebentisch The seminar takes a closer look at a critical discourse which links the critique of "aestheticization" of politics with a critique of democracy-or with a critiquof what is held to be its decay. For the process of "aestheticization" is taken toundermine the orientation of political culture to normativity; it is supposed to turn the democratic public into a mere mass. Against the backdrop of a long tradition reaching back into discussions in antiquity about theatrocracy and rhetoric, the seminar will investigate the implications of this discourse for a theory of democracy. How is the crisis, diagnosed by its different variants, described What notion of the aesthetic is therefore required Which idea of the political is assumed And is the opposition between the aesthetic and the political, presumed by this discourse of crisis, even plausible Are the issues that are being discussed under the rubric of the aesthetic indeed external to the political, or is it on the contrary that what is being rejected as aesthetic has political origins If the latter is the case, does this imply that what is being criticized as "aestheticization" should be thought of less as an externalinfluence than as a constitutive element of democracy
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3.00 Credits
Adorno Spring 2009. Three credits. Christoph Menke In his last years, Adorno has written two major books in which he has tried to elaborate in a systematic way the central arguments of his philosophy: Negative Dialectics ( 1966) and Aesthetic Theory ( 1970). Although Adorno himself was critical about the very idea of a systematic elaboration of philosophical arguments, these two books are indispensable for understanding his philosophy. We will therefore read selected passages of both books. In addition, we will confront them with some of Adorno's earlier essays, in order to address the question of the form of philosophic presentation ("Darstellung").
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3.00 Credits
The Notion of Life in German Idealism Spring 2009. Three credits. Thomas Khurana It is a widely shared assumption in the history of science, especially prominent since Michel Foucault's Les mots et les choses, that around 1800 a new concept of life emerges serving as the condition of possibility of modern biology. New modern notions of life have taken shape, however, not only in protobiological discourses. Simultaneously, complex notions of life were formed in the philosophical discourses of the time, especially in the various forms of German Idealism following Kant's Critique of Judgement. The seminar pursues (i) the way in which living objects and their possible recognizability are conceptualized in this line of thought, and (ii) the way in which the mind itself appears to have the structure or mode of a living process. As exposed in these discourses, life seems to be the very process and mode of being that a mind can encounter in the outer world that comes closest to its own structure, an "analog of freedom in nature" (Fichte). The seminar investigates how thedeployment of this idea, especially in the writings of G.W.F. Hegel, might lead to a non-reductionist concept of life and a living concept of mind.
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3.00 Credits
Metamorphoses of Sacralization: Poetry, Politics, and the Problem of Belief Fall 2008. Three credits. Simon Critchley This is a seminar about politics and belief: the argument is advanced that there are no "politics" without the experience of belief. As Oscar Wilde wrote,"Everything to be true must become a religion." The necessity for a momentof sacralization in the constitution of any polity is demonstrated, and a history of such sacralization is laid out, with historical examples of civil religion from the ancient Greeks through to American democracy, state socialism, and including current (perhaps vacuous) popular debates about European identity and the spectre of Jihadism. Using Rousseau as a guide, it is demonstrated how politics and law require something like religion to bind citizens together, referred to as "the catechism of the citizen." Hans Blumenberg ? The Legitimacof the Modern Age and Charles Taylor's recent work factor significantly in this model of politics, which significantly challenges the standard left-liberal secularization narrative. The course concludes by criticizing the contemporary theologization of politics, arguing instead for belief at the level of poetry rather than religion, leading to the closing hypothesis of "a politics of the supreme fiction." Note this seminar includes three sessions with Alain Badiou in November.
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3.00 Credits
E thical Realisms and Anti-Realisms Spring 2009. Three credits. Zed Adams This seminar is an in-depth look at a variety of contemporary positions on the reality, or lack thereof, of ethical value. Figures discussed will include Williams, Putnam, McDowell, Blackburn, Kalderon, and Joyce.
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3.00 Credits
Philosophy and Mythology Fall 2008. Three credits. Markus Gabriel This seminar is devoted to a reconstruction of the often neglected fact that the occidental "logos" arises out of a systematic denial of its mythological origin.From Presocratic metaphysics onwards, philosophy has tried to establish its autonomy by dispelling mythological images and narrative structures from the purely logical space of the "polis." This movement was radicalized inthe due course of modern philosophy. However, romanticism rediscovered the fundamental mythological and, therefore, imaginary heteronomy of the subject. In this seminar, we analyze the function of the concept of a new mythology (in Schlegel, H?derlin, and Schelling) qua meta-critical movement against the possibility of an entirely lucid self-constitution of the subject. We will then discuss the mythological institution of psychoanalysis on the basis of texts by Freud, Jung, and Wittgenstein. We will also consider texts by Heidegger (in particular on "the thing") which can be read as mythopoiesis.Eventually we will discuss the relation between mythology and the social imaginary according to Castoriadis. The aim of the seminar is to discuss the prospects of a critical self-limitation of "logos" by a paradoxical insightinto its mythological heteronomy.
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1.00 - 3.00 Credits
I ndependent Study Fall 2008, Spring 2009. One, Two, or Three credits. Students pursue advanced research on specific topics of their own design with the guidance of a faculty member. Permission of the instructor is required.
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