Continental Philosophy

This course will be devoted to two early Essays of Levinas, Time and Other and Existence and Existents. We will try to situate these two works in the context of the French reception of German Existentialism. The major goal of this course will be to show that the concept of Otherness in Levinas’s philosophy does not entail a simple abandonment of the Heideggerian “ontological difference” but lies in a new deduction of it that entails a new concept of Time, beyond its ontological (and Heideggerian) meaning. We will try to explain how this new deduction of the ontological difference is based on the elucidation of phenomenological events that remain hidden to the so-called “phenomenological reduction” and that requires a reform of the phenomenological method that Levinas inherits from Husserl and Heidegger. Thanks to this new method, Phenomenology can be accomplished as an investigation that is able to go beyond intentional objects.

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 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.