Courses
Contents
WINTER / SPRING 2025
Topic |
Course Description |
Venue |
Instructor |
| Kant and 19th Century Philosophy | This course focuses on a study of Kant and some of the most influential thinkers of the 19th century, such as Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. Typical questions pertain to the role of history in shaping our self-understanding in science, religion, and politics; the emergence of radical critiques of modern culture; the origins, nature, and limits of human knowledge; and the power dynamics that shape our identities and intersubjective relations. | DePaul | Avery Goldman |
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| Hegel II | Readings in the Science of Logic. | DePaul | Kevin Thompson |
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| Aesthetics | This course engages in a study of philosophical aesthetics as well as of the philosophy of art, as taken up by modern thinkers such as Kant, Schiller, and Hegel. Questions to be explored might include: the meaning of concepts such as beauty and the sublime; the role of art in our way of approaching and understanding the world, and its relationship to philosophy; the role of beauty and art in education; and the philosophical analysis of aesthetic judgments. Contemporary conceptions of art and beauty from perspectives such as feminism, decoloniality, black and Latino aesthetics may be included too. | DePaul | |
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| Kant’s First Critique | In this course we will read the Guyer/Wood translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781,1787). Like the Lisbon Earthquake (1755) and the French Revolution (1789-99) – both of which Kant wrote about – the publication of the first Critique was a monumental event. Just as Kant’s career is conventionally divided into pre-critical and post-critical periods, so the history of Western philosophy is often divided into pre-Kantian and post-Kantian phases. Our aim in this course will be to understand the scope and significance of Kant’s critical project. We will try to get through the entire text, but we will inevitably focus on some sections more than others. | Loyola University Chicago | Andrew Cutrofello |
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| Critical Theory & Phenomenology | Critical Theory is the name that Max Horkheimer gave to the distinctive brand of social philosophy undertaken by members of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, of which he was director. Critical theory uses the tools of social science not only to describe, explain, and predict social processes but to criticize society’s failure to bring about freedom and happiness, despite that society’s remarkable progress in science, technology, and material prosperity. Phenomenology, by contrast, is the name Edmund Husserl gave to a method of philosophical inquiry that begins from the standpoint of individual experience. He upheld direct, lived experience as a touchstone for criticizing the artificial, theoretically abstract, and one-sided “naturalizing” (or “objectifying”) image of the world that positivistic defenders of natural science dogmatically presume to be the only true picture of reality. Our course surveys the intersection of these two kinds of critical philosophy from the critical theory perspective. Prominent critical theorists such as Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, Rainer Forst, and Axel Honneth have been deeply influenced by some of the major exponents of phenomenology and existentialism (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Arendt, De Beauvoir, Levinas, and Derrida) in their own theories of human subjectivity, moral experience, and social existence. At the same time, they have criticized what they perceive to be phenomenology’s overly subjective, idealizing, essentializing and ahistorical description of human experience/existence. Some of the questions we will discuss are: Should experience, reason, or objective reality be the primary foundation for moral and ethical existence? Are consciousness and materiality (subject and object) fundamentally irreducible, essentially related in some form of identity, or interrelated in some other, more complicated way? What role does art and aesthetic experience play in a critical understanding of modern science and technology? How do objective structures (economic and political systems, cultural systems (of race, and gender, etc.) shape consciousness? Is there such a thing as false consciousness and ideology? | Loyola University Chicago | David Ingram |
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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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| German Literature and Critical Thought, 1750-1832 – Aesthetics and Political Theology | The goal of this seminar is to consider the manner where, when and how aesthetics can function as a critique of political theology. The meaning of each term in this summary—”aesthetic,” “critique,” and “political theology”—comes under discussion in each stage of the seminar, most especially the last, “political theology.” The seminar begins with Carl Schmitt; turns back to Baumgarten and Kant’s twin inauguration of aesthetics; examines three attempts to sketch the political dimensions of the Critique of Judgment (Schiller, Arendt, Shell); and concludes with an examination of Schelling’s Stuttgart lectures. | Northwestern | Peter Fenves |
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| The Philosophy of Kant | This seminar will be an in-depth exploration of Kant’s ethics, focusing on Groundwork, the second Critique, and Kant’s Religion. We will be discussing issues treated in my book, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, Kant’s Metaphysics of the Will. Topics treated will be a) Kant’s account of the will, b) the nature of Morality and Kant’s Categorical Imperative, c) With what right (quid juris) is the categorical imperative binding? d) the relation between Groundwork and the Second Critique, e) the highest good, and d) the nature of radical evil. Students will be responsible for several in-class presentations (three or four) and either two short papers or a longer seminar paper at the end. Students will be encouraged to submit their papers for presentation at a conference, or to produce a draft of a paper suitable for publication. | Purdue | Jacqueline Mariña |
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| Marx’s Philosophy & 20th-Century Marxism: History, Economics, the State, Ideology | The first half of the seminar will introduce some major themes of Marx’s philosophy—especially historical materialism, his economics and analysis of capitalism, his theory of ideology (especially as applied to morality and law), and the early Marx’s views on human nature and human flourishing—while the second half will consider the reception and development of Marx’s ideas about history, the state, ideology, and economics in 20th-century Continental European thought, with readings from, among others, Lukács, Adorno, Kojève, Hilferding, Luxemburg, Gramsci, and others. | University of Chicago | |
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| Kant and his Predecessors | This course will serve as an introduction to two of the most important philosophers of the modern period, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, along with, at the beginning, a brief look at Leibniz. Topics will include skepticism, personal identity, causation, free will, the basis of morality, and the limits of reason. | University of Illinois-Chicago | Sam Fleischacker |
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| Kant’s Moral Philosophy | Can morality be derived from reason alone? This class will examine Kant’s moral philosophy in depth, considering its basic principles and view of human motivation, as well as its implications for everyday life, politics and religion. Readings from Kant’s lectures on moral philosophy, his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, and his writings on politics and religion. |
University of Illinois-Chicago | Sam Fleischacker |
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| Kant’s Practical Philosophy | n/a | University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee | Nataliya Palatnik |
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| Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit | n/a | University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee | William Bristow |
FALL / AUTUMN 2024
Topic |
Course Description |
Venue |
Instructor |
| Heidegger: Hermeneutic Phenomenology | An introduction to Heidegger through study of a major work and one of the Marburg lectures. | DePaul | William McNeill |
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| Hegel | An Introduction to Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit. | DePaul | Kevin Thompson |
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| Contemporary European Philosophy: Hermeneutics | Hermeneutics is the study and theory of interpretation. With an emphasis on close readings of primary texts, this class explores the tradition of modern philosophical hermeneutics that emerges in the 19th century and continues until today. The following questions, among others, will be of particular interest: What is interpretation? What is the proper object of interpretation? What methodology, if any, should guide | Loyola University Chicago | Dimitris Apostolopoulos |
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| What is Hegelianism? | The seminar will explore the fundamental issues in Hegel’s philosophy by means of attention to the texts where he most clearly states his ambitions: his early essay, “The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy”; The Introduction to his “Phenomenology of Spirit”; The long Introduction to his “Encyclopedia Logic”; The Preface and Introduction to his “Philosophy of Right,” and the Introduction to his “Lectures on Fine Art.” | University of Chicago | Robert Pippin |
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| Existential Philosophy | Study of a selection of the major writings of the more important existential philosophers, e.g., Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and de Beauvoir. | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | Thomas Byrne |
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| Nineteenth Century Irrationalism: Schopenhauer/Nietzsche | n/a | University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee | William Bristow |
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| Nineteenth Century Philosophy | This course will be an examination of philosophical movements in 19th century European and American philosophy, especially as represented by seminal figures such as Fichte, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and William James. Movements covered will be: a) Post Kantian Idealism in the context of the response to Kant’s Copernican Revolution in Philosophy (Fichte, Schleiermacher, Hegel), b) Existentialism (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche), and c) Pragmatism (William James). | Purdue | Jacqueline Mariña |
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| German Literature, Critical Thought, and New Media 1900-45 | Built around selected key texts on the aesthetic theories of modernism (e.g., by Nietzsche, Adorno, Bürger, and Kittler), this course explores the relationship of literature and the visual arts and scrutinizes the status of literature within aesthetic production in modernity. Particular attention to works by Rilke, Kafka, Brecht, Lasker-Schüler, Benn, Musil, and Mann. | Northwestern | Sam Weber |