PHIL 24099 Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: Character, Agency, and Fate
In this course, we will read selected texts by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche with an eye toward broaching certain fundamental questions in ethics and the metaphysics of human agency, such as: What are the limits of rational reflection? What consequences might these limits have for our notion of moral responsibility, and our understanding of how to live well? Is ethical persuasion possible, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a person, an agent—and in what sense are personhood and agency something valuable? We will be particularly interested in determining how the stylistic peculiarities of Kierkegaard’s and Nietzsche’s respective authorships afford us a distinctive way of approaching these questions.