Continental Philosophy

Topic: Aristotle’s Physics (instructor: A. Brooks)
By Aristotle’s time, the intelligibility (and even the possibility) of a natural world had come under widespread philosophical attack. Aristotle is the first philosopher to defend the science of nature against these attacks, and at the same time the first philosopher to develop a systematic understanding of change and the natural world. This course is a reading of selections from Aristotle’s Physics, with the aim of touchng on all of its major themes, and investigating in depth some of Aristotle’s most important theses. Our reading of the Physics will be structured around four challenges to the possibility of a natural science: the Eleatic dilemma, Zeno’s puzzles about change, Plato’s ‘moment of change’ problem, and the problem of how causal chains can terminate. We will work out the details of Aristotle’s solutions to these problems, with particular attention to how they are related, and how his solutions contribute to his conception of nature.

Topic: Nietzsche On Skepticism, Nihilism, and the Affirmation of Life (instructor: R. Eichorn)

Nietzsche famously declared that he “distrust[s] all systematizers... The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” This has not deterred any number of commentators from trying to find some kind of philosophical system in what Alexander Nehamas has referred to as the “dazzling obscurity” of Nietzsche’s texts. In this course, we will explore the idea that the unity of Nietzsche’s thought (to the extent that it is unified) derives not from a philosophical doctrine or principle (such as the will to power), nor from a system built up of such doctrines or principles, but rather from a preoccupation with a set of interrelated cultural and existential crises. The catch-all term for these crises is nihilism. In the first half of the course, we will explore nihilism historically, by tracing Nietzsche’s account of (a) the socio-evolutionary emergence of the ‘human,’ (b) the rise of philosophy and Judeo–Christianity, and finally (c) the triumph of what Nietzsche calls the ‘ascetic ideal.’ In the second half of the course, we will explore the ambivalent place of philosophical skepticism in Nietzsche’s thought, specifically, its role as both a symptom of and the cure for nihilism—as both a negation and an affirmation of life.

Topic: Gilles Deleuze: Difference and Repetition (instructor: A. Werner)

There is an obvious fact which has played an important role in philosophy: the fact that when we think about the world, it is indeed the world which figures in our thoughts. Many philosophers – for example, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John McDowell – claim that making sense of this fact involves appealing to the irreducibly conceptual structure of thought. According to these philosophers, that the order of thinking and the order of the world are in some important sense the same is spelled out at the most fundamental level in terms of our ability to think about the world using concepts. Because of this, each of them attempts to overcome the skepticism-inducing idea of a sub-conceptual interface between thought and the world it thinks about. Like many other philosophers, Gilles Deleuze also aims to make sense of the fact that the order of thinking and the order of the world are the same. However, unlike the philosophers mentioned in the previous paragraph, he seeks to do so precisely by identifying a sub-conceptual realm which appears as a pre-conceptual element of thought and a non-conceptualizable element of the world. The pre-conceptual element of thought which he identifies is not some kind of skepticism-inducing interface between the world and our thinking of it: rather, it is one side of a sub-conceptual realm which is common to both thought and the world. Deleuze's work is immensely exciting because he agrees with the philosophers mentioned above that positing a sub-conceptual interface between thought and the world is philosophically disastrous, while nevertheless affirming that there is a philosophical explanation of the common origin of the structure of thought and the world which appeals to the sub-conceptual. A fascinating consequence which he draws is that thought and the will are not as such aimed at the true/the good. Thought and the will can aim at the true/the good, but this is not how they are most fundamentally constituted. The result is an a priori account of both the actuality and the necessity of false thoughts and bad actions. We will spend the course reading Deleuze's book Difference and Repetition in the hopes of understanding his arguments for the sub-conceptual and for the rejection of the image of thought and the will as true/good. To assist us in this project, we will occasionally draw upon secondary literature (from authors like Levi Bryant, Henry Somers-Hall, and Paul Patton) and we will also occasionally read selections from other writings by Deleuze (especially The Logic of Sense). Questions we will explore include: Are there sub-conceptual differences and repetitions? Are the concepts of difference and repetition intelligible independently of an account of conceptual structure? Can they be used to ground an account of thought's conceptual structure? Does the attempt to find a sub-conceptual element of thought and the world devolve into skepticism? Does Deleuze want us to give up on the projects of thinking true thoughts and performing good actions? If not, how are we able to think truly and act well on his view? Finally, at the end of the course we will consider Deleuze's view of philosophy by looking at selections from the book What is Philosophy? (by Deleuze and Felix Guattari). One of the first things that strikes any reader of Deleuze is how fluid his terminology and arguments appear to be. This fluidity seems to be in some kind of important relationship to his philosophical theory, which attempts to explain the pre-conceptual fluidity of thought and the world. Nevertheless, his work is full of arguments which employ concepts. If philosophy is supposed to be in contact with a sub-conceptual realm, how should we evaluate it? What kind of argumentative resources should it draw upon? What is its task? A note about philosophical pre-requisites: Deleuze's writing is difficult, principally because he draws on many different sources in D&R (both philosophical – Duns Scotus, Kant, Nietzsche, etc. – and non-philosophical – different novelists, painters, biologists, and mathematicians, as well as Freud, Tarde, Saussure, etc.). This course will not presuppose any prior knowledge of the philosophical and non-philosophical traditions from which Deleuze draws, or any prior knowledge of the philosophical terrain (France in the 60's) in which Deleuze wrote. Antecedent familiarity with the traditions Deleuze is in dialogue with may allows students to explore connections between Deleuze's work and the work of others more fully, but it is neither necessary nor expected. The content of the course only presupposes an interest in the philosophical project of explaining the relationship between mind and world.

The aim of this course will be to introduce to one of the most important and discussed work pertaining to the continental field of the Philosophy of the XXth Century: Heidegger's Being and Time. Our course will be structured by two main movements. On the one hand we will introduce to the main and fundamental concepts developed by Heidegger in his work through analytic sessions devoted to the most important sections of Sein und Zeit. On the other hand, we will follow the way Sein und Zeit was received and discussed in the field of French Contemporary Continental Philosophy - especially through Derrida's and Levinas's interpretations and discussions of Sein und Zeit. The double structure of our itinerary obeys to a philosophical necessity which will take the form of a leading question: is it possible to think beyond the primacy of the horizon of Being - drawn by Heidegger in Sein und Zeit - anything like an "Otherwise than Being"? And if so, we will have to elucidate why and in what sense such an alternative horizon of sense does not entails the abandonment of the Heideggerian Question of Being, but leads, on the contrary, to the full explanation of the background without which the Question of Being raised by Sein und Zeit becomes unintelligible.

This course is devoted to one of the most important philosophical books of the continental tradition, Levinas's Totality and Infinity. We will propose a systematic reading of Levinas's masterpiece in order to show the main aspects of Levinas's philosophical elaboration. The first aspect of our course will be to insist on the way Levinas takes position in the field of German and French phenomenology, in what consists exactly his technical and systematic critique of Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre's conceptualities. We will, for that reason, propose to make Totality and Infinity in resonance with the most important sections of Husserl's Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and a Philosophical Phenomenology, Heidegger's Being and Time and Sartre's Being and Nothingness. This preliminary step will give us the conceptual means required in order to understand the exact philosophical position of Levinas towards the concept of society - that Levinas inherits directly from the French Sociological tradition (Durkheim in particular). Once such a background clarified it will become possible to understand Levinas's own elaboration towards the notion of society and for what reason the social experience coincides for him with a metaphysical experience - in other words in what sense Levinas can claim that the social relationship articulates what Descartes called the Idea of the Infinite. Such a second step will lead us to a last step which constitutes the ultimate demonstrative goal of our course: we will indeed try to show the necessity to overcome with Levinas the universalization of the notion of phenomenon coming from Husserl and Heidegger, to propose, in other words, a deflationist understanding of the notion of phenomenon. Such a deflationist understanding does not imply nevertheless the abandonment of the notion of phenomenon. On the contrary the metaphysics of society that we will propose, will lead us to think society as the fundamental presupposition from which the notion of phenomena coming from the Phenomenological tradition can find its logical meaning. What will be at stake is nothing else than the possibility of thinking anew the notion of Metaphysics in order to overcome the so-called "end of Metaphysics" proclaimed by Heidegger and Derrida.

This course will be based on a direct confrontation between Sartre’s and Michel Henry’s phenomenological works. The main goal of this course will be to reintroduce the concept of immanence in a phenomenological sense beyond its critique by the philosophies of existence – of the so-called extatic dimension of human existence. The main goal of this course will be then to introduce two Sartre’s and Michel Henry’s phenomenological masterpieces (mainly Sartre’s The Transcendence of the Ego (la Transcendance de l’Ego) and Henry’s The Essence of Manifestation  (L’Essence de la manifestation)). Does the discovery of our intentional or existential openness to the world implies necessarily the renunciation to the notion of immanence or do we have to elaborate a phenomenological meaning for the concept of immanence in order to go further in the comprehension of the transcendent nature of our being? This will be the leading question of our seminar.

This course centers on a close reading of the first volume of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, with some attention to his writings on the history of ancient conceptualizations of sex. How should a history of sexuality take into account scientific theories, social relations of power, and different experiences of the self? We discuss the contrasting descriptions and conceptions of sexual behavior before and after the emergence of a science of sexuality. Other writers influenced by and critical of Foucault are also discussed.

This course will provide a rapid-fire survey of the philosophical sources of contemporary literary and critical theory.  We will begin with a brief discussion of the sort of humanism at issue in the critique—accounts of human life and thought that treat the individual human being as the primary unit for work in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences.  This kind of humanism is at the core of contemporary common sense.  It is, to that extent, indispensable in our understanding of how to move around in the world and get along with one another.  That is why we will conduct critique, rather than plain criticism, in this course: in critique, one remains indebted to the system under critical scrutiny, even while working to understand its failings and limitations.  Our tour of thought produced in the service of critique will involve work by Hegel, Marx, Gramsci, Freud, Fanon, Lacan, and Althusser. We will conclude with a couple of pieces of recent work that draws from these sources.  The aim of the course is to provide students with an opportunity to engage with some extraordinarily influential work that continues to inform humanistic inquiry.

The aim of this course is to introduce students to one of the most important and influential traditions in the European Philosophy of the 20th Century: Phenomenology. The main task of this course will be to present Phenomenology’s main concepts and the meaning of Phenomenology’s transformations from Husserl to Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas and Henry.The fundamental credo of Phenomenology consists in the emphasis laid upon phenomena given to consciousness. This emphasis coincides with the “return to things in themselves” as formulated by Husserl. What can this kind of return actually mean? And what does this claim suggest about philosophical practices prior to phenomenology, idealism or empiricism? In what way, for Husserl, was classical philosophy not able to give access to things such as they are truly given ? And what is the meaning of such idea of « givenness » ? Does Phenomenology fall into the so-called « myth of the Given » ?No future phenomenologists after Husserl will question the fundamental idea of returning to things in themselves thanks to the phenomenological importance given to phenomena, but they will question the privilege of intentional consciousness postulated by Husserl - Heidegger will expand phenomenology to the ancient question of “Being” (thanks to the existential clarification of the Husserlian concept of Intentionality) and Levinas will question Husserl’s and Heidegger’s approaches of phenomenology - intentional and existential - as falling into the Western problem of Ontology and Totality against Otherness and Ethics. As we will see, even if Phenomenology coincides with the philosophical description of our "Openness to Exteriority", this openness - Intentional, Existential or Ethical - entails necessarily not the abandonment, but a radical redefinition of the concept of Subjective Immanence."

This course will be devoted to the confrontation of two of the most important masterpieces of Continental Philosophy: Being and Time of Heidegger and Totality and Infinity of Levinas. In this course we shall try first to focus on the Heideggerian project of a “deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence”. Against Heidegger, Levinas maintains that ontology cannot be fundamental—the question of being at the core of Heidegger's project cannot just be directed to one's own tacit understanding of being.  If the question of being is an actual question, its addressee must be an Other.  Levinas teaches that metaphysical experience of otherness cannot be captured in Heideggerian fundamental ontology. Nevertheless, Derrida in “Violence and Metaphysics” challenges Levinas’s idea of a Metaphysical Experience that could be entirely free of  Ontology and Phenomenality (in the Heidegger's senses of these terms). Against Levinas he defends the the idea that the Other cannot be identified to a Metaphysical Presence (as it is for Levinas) but necessarily coincides with an Absence and a Trace. We will try to identify and to criticize such a reduction of the Levinas' Metaphysics to the so-called "Metaphysics of Presence" identified and deconstructed by Heidegger and Derrida. Through the analysis of the philosophical conflicts between Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida about metaphysics, the fundamental goal of this course will be to defend a sense for Metaphysics after the so-called “End of Metaphysics."

Søren Kierkegaard created a pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus, who is cited as the author of Philosophical Crumbs as well as The Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Crumbs.  This course will begin with a careful reading of Philosophical Crumbs.  If there is time, we will go on to The Concluding Unscientific Postscript.  This course is open to graduate students in the Committee on Social Thought and in the Philosophy Department.  For all other students, permission of the instructor is required.

A close reading of Michel Foucault’s 1979-80 course at the Collège de France, Du gouvernement des vivants. Foucault’s most extensive course on early Christianity, these lectures examine the relations between the government of the self and regimes of truth through a detailed analysis of Christian penitential practices, with special attention to the practices of exomologēsis and exagoreusis. We will read this course both taking into account Foucault’s sustained interest in ancient thought and with a focus on the more general historical and theoretical conclusions that can be drawn from his analyses. (I)