Origins of Contemporary Thought
Fall 2008
This course examines some important topics in intellectual history from Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) onward. The course does not claim to survey the intellectual history of the period in question but instead focuses on a few important themes. These include: (1) the decline of belief in the notion of a single, progressive historical process, a notion that dominated much of nineteenth-century thought both before and after Darwin; (2) the rise of the notion of a pre-rational or irrational unconscious, which paralleled doubts concerning the rational ordering of the world in general; (3) the emergence of "aestheticism" and of "crisis thought"; and (4) the emergence of new views of interpretation and of science. The overall theme is the presence of, and challenges to, the notion that there is a rationality that is either embedded in the world itself or that flows from some sort of transcendent guarantor. Whether there is or isn’t such a rationality, and what its content or guarantor might be if there is, is the often unstated question underlying much present-day thinking and conflict.
Reading (in order of use): Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (Penguin); Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (Penguin), The Genealogy of Morals (Hackett), and The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Kaufmann (Penguin); Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (California); Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Discus Avon) and Civilization and Its Discontents (Norton); and Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (State University of New York Press). (The Heidegger reading will be very selective, although an attempt will be made to state the basic arguments of the first 35 or so sections of the book.) There will be a relatively short class packet and a very small set of toolkit readings. Course Requirements: weekly "think questions," midterm, synthesizing term paper, final exam. The term paper and final exam carry heavy weight in the final grade.