Courses
WINTER / SPRING 2026
Topic |
Course Description |
Venue |
Instructor |
| The Concept of Fetishism | This seminar will explore the concept of fetishism, perhaps the chief metaphor for alienation and mystification in European philosophy. Rooted in a certain (Eurocentric) anthropology of African religious practices, the concept of fetishism has been famously deployed within psychoanalysis and Marxism. We will focus on the Marxist formulation of this metaphor (“commodity fetishism”), as well as how it has been re-interpreted in liberationist/decolonial attempts to develop an “anti-fetishist method.” We will start by studying Marx’s well-known section on the topic in Capital and Dussel’s The Theological Metaphors of Marx. We will then shift to contemporary assessments of the concept within cultural anthropology and anthropology-influenced philosophy, such as Lorand Matory and Bruno Latour. We will end with some contemporary redeployments of this notion and attempts to develop a post-metaphysical anti-fetishist method. | DePaul | Rafael Vizcaíno |
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| Institution and Passivity in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty | The course carefully examines passivity and institution – two central concepts in current debates in critical and political phenomenology – and tracks their import for the development of Merleau-Ponty’s and Husserl’s understanding of phenomenology as method of radical reflection. We begin with Husserl’s early/mid-1920s lectures on passive synthesis (sections) coupled with his analyses of Leiblichkeit (lived bodiliness), style, and practical possibility constitution in Ideas II as well as his work on typification in Experience and Judgment. We then turn to Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of pre-givenness and of passivity-in-institution in his 1954-55 courses The Problem of Passivity and Institution in Personal and Public History. To explore to what extent Merleau-Ponty departs from Husserl’s understanding of Stiftung (institution/establishment), we focus on the latter’s Origin of Geometry and on key sections of the Crisis, stressing Husserl’s generative method of historical-intentional reflection (Besinnung) – a method whose aim is to clarify the sedimented socio-cultural and normative dimensions of Sinnstiftungen (senseinstitutions) understood as conditions for all Sinnbildung (sense-making). This will mark a shift to metaphenomenological questions, namely, to questions surrounding the very possibility of transcendental phenomenology as critique of the present, especially given its commitments to presuppositionlessness (Voraussetzungslosigkeit) and to transcendental necessity supra-historically construed. Here, Husserl’s introduction to Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929) and his 1930 Nachwort to Ideas I will prove crucial. So will MerleauPonty’s incisive Preface to the Phenomenology of Perception as well as his archeological approach to the intertwinement (Verflechtung/entrelacement) of self-other, world, and language in his The Possibility of Philosophy Today (1958-59) and Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology/On Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry’ (1959-60) courses, in chapters 1 and 4 of The Visible and the Invisible (including key working notes), and in his essays ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’ (1960) and ‘Eye and Mind’ (1961). The course does not presuppose in-depth familiarity with phenomenology. | DePaul | Smaranda Aldea |
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| Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre | The Wissenschaftslehre is a pivotal text for the post-Kantian period and for understanding the stakes of German Idealism. In Athenäum Fragment Nr. 216, Friedrich Schlegel claims that, “The French Revolution, Fichte’s philosophy, and Goethe’s Meister are the greatest tendencies of the age” (KFSA 2, 198).1 One can understand Schlegel’s reference to Fichte’s philosophy as a celebration of the ways in which it had revolutionized the field of philosophy. Fichte’s work presented new philosophical challenges to the reader and a new way to do philosophy. In our investigation of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, we shall explore it as a revolutionary text, leading its readers on a path to their Bildung. Fichte’s revolutionary philosophy was, in part, the result of his unique Bildung, rooted in his working-class background, and we will also consider that background. The Wissenschaftslehre, presented in no fewer than 17 versions /installments/performances throughout Fichte’s life underwent a kind of Bildung as well, even while its underlying meaning stayed the same. When reading Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, the reader is struck by Fichte’s insistence that we must perform his philosophy, just as he is performing it for us in his writing. | DePaul | Elizabeth Millán Brusslan |
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| Psychoanalysis and Social Theory | Despite its violent rejection by much of contemporary psychology and philosophy, psychoanalysis has been deeply influential for 20th and 21st century thought. References to the unconscious, the ego, the id, repression, foreclosure, trauma, the symbolic order, the real, attachment theory and other key psychoanalytic concepts shaped and still shape both philosophical and popular conceptions of the self and of society. This course will introduce students to psychoanalysis and, particularly, its relationship to social theorizing. We will explore some of psychoanalysis’ key claims, explore its violent rejection by some philosophers and psychologists, and ask why it has been and continues to be so alluring to those wanting to account for, diagnose, and perhaps cure, both society and the subjects who make it up. We will read works by psychoanalytic figures like Freud, Lacan, and Klein and also engage with social theorists who draw on and contest psychoanalysis in continental philosophy, queer theory, feminist philosophy, and philosophies of race. | Loyola University Chicago | Eyo Ewara |
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| God and the Other | This course engages several philosophical themes regarding “God and the Other,” a pivotal topic in contemporary phenomenology, Catholic Intellectual Thought, and philosophy of religion. Some of the principal tensions that we will explore include: • ethics and metaphysics as first philosophy; • immanence and transcendence as the manifestation of the sacred; • alterity and intersubjectivity in terms of givenness and embodiment; • ethical and political implications of deconstruction concerning race, gender, violence, and excess; and • the non-traceability of the gift and the non-phenomenality of the (w)Holy Other in postmodern thought. We will explore these issues thematically and historically by drawing upon influences and critiques of Sören Kierkegaard, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, and Gianni Vattimo. Some additional background material will include Plato and the early Greek tragic poets; medieval apophatic philosophers (St. Augustine and Meister Eckhart); the re-emergence of tragic literature in nineteenth century Romanticism (Hölderlin, Schelling); and the rejection of modernism by post-modern Catholic 7 philosophers engaging in “weak theology” and “radical orthodoxy.” Readings will be drawn from primary texts. | Loyola University Chicago | Michael Andrews |
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| Introduction to Critical Theory | In this class, we will focus on the foundations of critical theory in the works of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Weber, paying particular attention to the methods they deploy in the treatment of moral and religious phenomena. Lectures will primarily involve a close analysis and discussion of the readings. | Northwestern | Mark Alznauer |
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| Hegel’s Philosophy of Right | This course will involve a close reading of Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820). The Philosophy of Right is both the most accessible entry points into Hegel’s mature thought and one of the greatest works in the history of European political philosophy. We will focus on the basic argumentative structure of the work, paying particular attention to Hegel’s unprecedented synthesis of normative and historical claims. | Northwestern | Mark Alznauer |
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| Seminar in Recent Continental Philosophy | This seminar will examine Nietzsche philosophy through an examination of key texts and selected secondary works. | Purdue | Smith/Mollison |
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| Modernism and the Meaning of Life | In the early part of the 20th Century, novelists from all over Europe converged on the thought that humanity was in some kind of crisis: culture had broken. In this class, we will read classics of modernist literature by James Joyce, Robert Musil, Fernando Pessoa, Virginia Woolf, Hermann Broch, Wallace Stevens, alongside philosophical and critical texts by William James, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukacs, Robert Pippin and others. Our goal will be to try to understand what has changed for us: what is the new problem of the meaning of life? | University of Chicago | Agnes Callard |
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| Is Morality Objective or Created? Nietzsche, Plato, and the Greeks |
Nietzsche claims that “genuine philosophers” (unlike “philosophical laborers” like Kant and Hegel, who simply “press into formulas” existing moralities) are creators of value, or, as he puts it, “commanders and legislators: they say, ‘Thus it should be,’ they determine first the ‘where to?’ and ‘what for’ of a people” (Beyond Good and Evil, section 211). If Kant and Hegel are not “genuine philosophers” in this sense, then who is? Homer? The Presocratics? Plato? Nietzsche? And what values then does Nietzsche create? The first half of the seminar will examine Nietzsche’s reasons for treating moralities as historical artifacts, that can be explained in terms of the psychological needs of particular peoples at particular times, rather than timeless or objective standards governing human conduct. We then consider the possibility that Nietzsche is a “genuine philosopher,” a “creator of values,” and try to understand what that means. In the second half of the seminar, we consider whether several major Greek figures–Homer, whom Nietzsche lauds; the Presocratics, whom he, likewise, admires; and Plato, about whom Nietzsche is decidedly more ambivalent–created new values. |
University of Chicago | Michael Forster and Brian Leiter |
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| Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic | A study of the Transcendental Dialectic of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. | University of Chicago | Maya Krishnan and Thomas Pendlebury |
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| Heidegger’s Critique of German Idealism |
Martin Heidegger claimed that the entire western philosophical tradition reached its ‘culmination’ (Vollendung) in the philosophy of German Idealism. In this course we will take this diagnosis seriously, work to understand its presuppositions and implications, and attempt to assess its cogency. Our procedure will be to conduct an intensive study of Heidegger’s interpretations of Kantian and Hegelian metaphysics. We will read in their entirety Heidegger’s major works on Kant’s theoretical philosophy from the 1920s through the 1960s, as well as his central writings on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic. In addition to supplementary readings from Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, we may also read excerpts from Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Christian Wolff, and Alexander Baumgarten. It is possible we may also cast occasional side-long glances at the status of metaphysics in thinkers who either decisively influenced Heidegger’s critique of the tradition or were decisively influenced by it (e.g. Nietzsche, Derrida). |
University of Chicago | Karl von der Luft |
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| Logic and Metaphysics | In this seminar, we will examine the logical and metaphysical writings of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. We will begin by exploring the metaphysical underpinnings of Leibniz’s calculus of analytic containment, as developed in such essays as General Inquiries into the Analysis of Concepts and Truths (1686) and A Mathematics of Reason (1690). We then consider how Leibniz’s logic informs some of the metaphysical ideas developed in some of Leibniz’s less technical philosophical writings, including Discourse on Metaphysics (1686) and On the Ultimate Origination of Things (1697). These distinctive logico-metaphysical conceptions, which give a singular shape to Leibniz’s philosophy, reach their full maturity in his best known essay on metaphysics, the Monadology (1714), with which the seminar will conclude. | University of Chicago | Anubav Vasudevan |
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| Heidegger’s Later Philosophy | In this course, we will be considering key themes from the “later” Heidegger’s thought— difficult to periodize, but roughly his post-Being and Time work from the mid-1930s onwards, after the so-called “turn.” We will be focusing, in particular, on Heidegger’s philosophy of art and his ethico-social philosophy, and treating adjacent issues, such as his notions of unconcealment and the fourfold. Texts to be studied include “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” “What are Poets For?,” “Building Dwelling Thinking,” “Letter on Humanism,” and “The Question Concerning Technology.” We will also be considering fraught questions around the relationship between Heidegger’s thought and his politics, and the extent to which the two are entangled and the extent to which they can be disentangled. | Notre Dame | Andrew Huddleston |
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| History of Philosophy of Science from the Scientific Revolution to 1900 | This course examines the work of key figures from the history of natural philosophy and science. Placing the philosophical work of Leibniz, Newton, Hume, Kant, Alexander Humboldt, Whewell, J. S. Mill, Helmholtz, Ernst Mach, Wilhelm Wundt, William James, Einstein, Henri Poincare, Bergson, and others, within a wider philosophical, historical, and cultural context, we will explore how and why they identified their central problems and the methods they used to approach those. We will focus on understanding how the central problems and theories that these figures worked on, ranging from questions of space, time, motion and substance/matter to theories of human sensibility and perception, to wider epistemological and metaphysical investigations, engaged the scholarly communities surrounding them, and helped them promote broader programmatic goals for reshaping and reforming philosophy/science. As they engaged contemporary philosophers/scientists over fundamental philosophical questions, they pressed new ideals of knowledge and programs to reform natural philosophy and reorganize the broader scholarly community – and society itself (e.g., Kant). We will explore how these natural philosophers framed new epistemologies and simultaneously promoted new ideals of the philosopher, scholar, and/or educated citizen, who would be capable of creating valid knowledge. In sum, we will explore how preeminent natural philosophers, at once, made original contributions to epistemology, understanding of space and time, and metaphysics, as they framed new visions of the knowing subject within a changing society. | Notre Dame | Don Howard |
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| Contemporary Kantian Practical Thought | n/a | University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee | Nataliya Palatnik |
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