Spring

Is opera an archaic and exotic pageant for fanciers of overweight canaries, or a relevant art form of great subtlety and complexity that has the power to be revelatory? In this course of eight sessions, jointly taught by Professor Martha Nussbaum and Anthony Freud, General Director of Lyric Opera of Chicago, we explore the multi-disciplinary nature of this elusive and much-maligned art form, with its four hundred-year-old European roots, discussing both historic and philosophical contexts and the practicalities of interpretation and production in a very un-European, twenty-first century city.

Anchoring each session around a different opera, we will be joined by a variety of guest experts, one each week, including a director, a conductor, a designer and two singers, to enable us to explore different perspectives.

The list of operas to be discussed include Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppaea, Mozart's Don Giovanni, Rossini’s La Cenerentola, Verdi's Don Carlos, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Wagner's Die Meistersinger, Strauss's Elektra, and Britten's Billy Budd. (A) (I)

This seminar will consist in a close reading of Aristotle’s great contribution to philosophical psychology, his De Anima, which we will read in conjunction with Sean Kelsey’s much-anticipated manuscript on the subject.  Themes will include the relation between mind and world, the natures of perception and thought, the distinctions between different kinds of minds, the definition of "life."  The seminar will take the form of a reading group, in which various graduate students and faculty members will participate.  Students taking the course for credit will be expected to submit a term paper.  Hours to be arranged. (IV)

 

Leo Strauss’s œuvre contains two discussions of the works of classical poets: An outstanding book on Aristophanes’ comedies (Socrates and Aristophanes, 1966), and a demanding essay on Lucretius’ poem (“Notes on Lucretius”, 1968). Socrates and Aristophanes I shall teach in the spring of 2022. In the spring of 2021, I shall present my interpretation of Strauss’s “Notes on Lucretius” and of Lucretius’ work itself − a most radical, non-teleological and non-anthropocentric view of nature. In a 1949 letter to E. Voegelin Strauss wrote about Lucretius: “His poem is the purest and most glorious expression of the attitude that elicits consolation from the absolutely hopeless truth for the only reason that it is the truth … The closest approximation in our world is the side of Nietzsche that is turned to science.” A special focus of the seminar will be on the poetic means Lucretius uses for teaching philosophy. Literature: Leo Strauss: “Notes on Lucretius,” in: Liberalism Ancient and Modern. New York 1968, pp. 76−139. Lucretius: De rerum natura / On the Nature of Things. Ed. Cyril Bailey, Oxford 1947. 

In this course, we will examine the psychological bases of knowledge and inquire into their wider epistemological significance. Our guiding aim is to understand
some of the ways in which our reliance on intuition, heuristics, and gut feelings shape our attitudes toward “fake news”—or deliberate misinformation and manipulation—in its many guises. Three questions will guide our investigation. First, how should insights about the rationality (or lack thereof) of gut feelings inform the way we think about fundamental issues in epistemology? We will consider, for example, justification, the nature of evidence, the reliability of testimony, and intellectual virtues and
vices. Second, might some of the reasoning biases that are typically deemed irrational be, at least in some contexts, rational? Third, insofar as our gut feelings do produce irrational behavior, what lessons should we draw about our own thinking and the ways in which we evaluate and engage in discourse? What normative principles might we adopt that both (a) give due place to our deep dependence upon gut feelings and (b) help mitigate their potentially pernicious effects? (B)

This course will study in alternation chapters from Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed and David Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, two major philosophical works whose literary forms are at least as important as their contents. Topics will include human knowledge of the existence and nature of God, anthropomorphism and idolatry, religious language, and the problem of evil. Time permitting, we shall also read other short works by these two authors on related themes. (B) (III)

This is a workshop for 2nd year philosophy graduate students, in which students revise a piece of work to satisfy the PhD program requirements.

The texts we will read: Heidegger’s 1929 book, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, his 1935 course, published as the book What is a Thing, the critique of Hegel published in 1957, Identity and Difference, and the 1942/43 lectures published as Hegel’s Concept of Experience.  We will conclude with a discussion of Heidegger’s 1936 lectures, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom.

The topic of the course: finitude.

In this seminar we shall consider contemporary psychoanalytic thinking on fundamental aspects of human being: envy and gratitude, the capacity to learn from experience, mourning and depression, Oedipal struggles, the structure of the I, the superego and other forms of defense.  We shall also consider relevant clinical concepts such as projective identification, splitting, internal objects, the paranoid-schizoid position, the depressive position, and attacks on linking. The seminar will focus on a group of psychoanalytic thinkers who have come to be known as the Contemporary Kleinians.  Their work develops the traditions of thinking that flow from the works of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein -- and we shall consider their writings as well when appropriate.  Readings from Betty Joseph, Edna O'Shaughnessy, Wilfrid Bion, Hanna Segal, Elizabeth Spillius, John Steiner, Ronald Britton, Michael Feldman, Irma Brenman Pick and others.