Origins of Modern Thought: Montaigne to Sartre
Spring 2010
The main purpose of this course is to offer an account of the basics of European intellectual history from about 1600 to the mid-twentieth century. Students will find out who the most original thinkers were, when they lived, what their central arguments were, and how they fit into a wider pattern. A secondary purpose is to give some sense of the background to our own disciplines and ways of thinking now. I anticipate that students majoring or planning to major in a wide variety of fields will find the course useful and interesting.
We shall look at such intellectual trends or movements as skepticism, seventeenth-century “rationalist” philosophy, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, idealism, positivism, historicism, and existentialism. Among the thinkers whom we shall read (selectively) are Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Grotius, Pascal, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Montesquieu, La Mettrie, Rousseau, Smith, Bentham, Schiller, Humboldt, Coleridge, Madame de Staël, Hegel, Comte, Kierkegaard, J. S. Mill, D. F. Strauss, Nietzsche, Weber, and Sartre. To try to impart some order to this diverse material, I propose that we regard these thinkers as articulating a sequence of world views or "epistemes" leading from what I call "unified ordering" through "balanced tension" to "embedded progress," and finally to the collapse of any unified conception. We shall focus on four concerns: "being" or "world," nature, method, and humanity.
The course does not presuppose specialized knowledge, although it does presuppose an ability to listen and read carefully. It is intended to be my most basic 3000-level course. However, it is more analytic than are most courses in history. It is really a combination of history and philosophy.
There will be around ten short-answer “think questions” that are required but that are not graded on a scale; a 50-minute midterm that will have a marginal effect on the grade; a term paper that asks you to synthesize some of the reading; and a final. The term paper and the final exam each pretty much count for 50% of the final grade, but the TQ’s and the midterm can move things up or down a bit.
The book list is not yet definitive, but the following are likely prospects: Montaigne, Essays (selected), trans. J. M. Cohen; Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, Montesquieu, Persian Letters, Rousseau, On the Social Contract; Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals; J. S. Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays; and Marino, ed., Basic Writings of Existentialism. There will also be a course packet, as well as some in-copyright readings on COLLAB.
We shall look at such intellectual trends or movements as skepticism, seventeenth-century “rationalist” philosophy, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, idealism, positivism, historicism, and existentialism. Among the thinkers whom we shall read (selectively) are Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Grotius, Pascal, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Montesquieu, La Mettrie, Rousseau, Smith, Bentham, Schiller, Humboldt, Coleridge, Madame de Staël, Hegel, Comte, Kierkegaard, J. S. Mill, D. F. Strauss, Nietzsche, Weber, and Sartre. To try to impart some order to this diverse material, I propose that we regard these thinkers as articulating a sequence of world views or "epistemes" leading from what I call "unified ordering" through "balanced tension" to "embedded progress," and finally to the collapse of any unified conception. We shall focus on four concerns: "being" or "world," nature, method, and humanity.
The course does not presuppose specialized knowledge, although it does presuppose an ability to listen and read carefully. It is intended to be my most basic 3000-level course. However, it is more analytic than are most courses in history. It is really a combination of history and philosophy.
There will be around ten short-answer “think questions” that are required but that are not graded on a scale; a 50-minute midterm that will have a marginal effect on the grade; a term paper that asks you to synthesize some of the reading; and a final. The term paper and the final exam each pretty much count for 50% of the final grade, but the TQ’s and the midterm can move things up or down a bit.
The book list is not yet definitive, but the following are likely prospects: Montaigne, Essays (selected), trans. J. M. Cohen; Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, Montesquieu, Persian Letters, Rousseau, On the Social Contract; Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals; J. S. Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays; and Marino, ed., Basic Writings of Existentialism. There will also be a course packet, as well as some in-copyright readings on COLLAB.
